🚀 go-pugleaf

>Posted on 14 Dec 1992 at 13:41:47 by jimmy donal wales

>>>Hope you're not the Jamie that Aerosmith sing[?] about.
>
>Jamie:
>>I wouldn't know. Presumably, I am, relative to SOME interpretation....
>
>This is precisely what I find so bizarre about your position.

I don't see why it's bizarre. It seems obviously true, to me.

>What is a proposition, as distinct from a sentence?  I've always
>(well, not always, only for the past few years since I heard about
>such things!) thought of propositions as equivalence classes for
>sentences.  But I'm not sure how this fits into your interpretational
>scheme.

It's ok to think of propositions as equivalence classes of sentences.
Well, by and large it is (not for sentences that contain indexicals).
But then you'd BETTER be taking INTERPRETED sentences, otherwise
the conception of propositions makes no sense.

Propositions are what sentences express. I can say what a French person
says even though I don't speak French. That "what" is a proposition.
I can also believe a proposition, etc.
Propositions are contents of sentences.

>Do propositions need interpretation?  Or is interpretation the scheme
>that transforms a sentence into a proposition?

The latter.
An interpretation of a sentence tells you what proposition it expresses.
(Roughly--it might tell you something slightly different, e.g. if the
sentence contains an indexical.)

>Did you say that mental states need interpretation?  It seems more
>plausible to say that (at least some!) mental states (or processes)
>ARE interpretation.

Mental states have contents. So do sentences. What content a sentence
has is a matter of its interpretation. What content a mental state
has is a matter of its interpretation.

Suppose you believe that mental states are brain states (or at least
that a token of a mental state is a token of a brain state, to allow
someone like Donald Davidson to agree). A brain state is not a proposition.
But it may have a propositional content.

>I'm not above reading a book, if you want to suggest one.  After all,
>Christmas vacation IS coming up and Randall hasn't come through with
>his promised suggested reading on QM.  (Nudge, nudge.)

Yike.
I can't think of a good one on the relevant topic.
Sorry.

>I wish Mikhail Zeleny would attack me.

I look forward to it.

Jamie