tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620592913362912633.post3600384598843902064..comments2014-09-12T22:18:15.982+01:00Comments on fancyfa'u – Function Fall: Referential transparencymudrihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00537251575243498001noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-620592913362912633.post-43937093185550895432014-09-12T22:18:15.982+01:002014-09-12T22:18:15.982+01:000) Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! It&#...0) Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us! It's refreshing and helpful to see these problems approached from an intellectual background different from my own. Is your theory of reference a novel creation? Does it have any points of contact with the existing academic literature?<br /><br />1) As a reader who only partially remembers Death Note, it would be helpful if you gave a recap of the relevant facts of the story as far as your examples go.<br /><br />2) If I understand correctly, you are giving a three-part theory of reference in which noun phrases are related to objects by an intermediary abstraction called a referrer. The nature of these referrers depend partially on the speaker. Under what precise conditions are two referrers identical?<br /><br />3) It's not entirely clear to me on what grounds you object to referentially opaque objects; I can see a mark against them on grounds of metaphysical extravagance. They appear to be objects fabricated to solve a philosophical problem which comes up when trying to formalize ordinary reasoning into certain logical systems, and are probably not in a typical language user's pre-philosophical ontology. I think a good way to say this is that referentially opaque propositions are distinct from ordinary ones in that they include certain contextual information baked into them which ordinary claims lack, but which is very helpful for analysing certain important ideas, such as belief, in terms of truth-functions.<br /><br />It is, I think, reasonable to view nonce fabrications of strange new abstractions with suspicion. But this also seems to apply to your intermediary reference layer. A common motivation for semantic theories is that they explain the relationship between our language and reality, but here you seem to have built a wall, or at least a metaphysical bureaucracy, around reality. It seems somewhat vulnerable particularly considering that you also posit the existence of an independent objective reality to which we do not have direct access. I'd like to see some more argument in favor of the intermediary layer along those lines.<br /><br />4) If our noun phrases always touch referrers instead of phenomena, how do you articulate this question?<br /><br />5) Structurally, your three-part theory results in the property that certain 'that-clauses' in ordinary language lack substitutivity with respect to all(?) terms we can actually use in speech. In other words, the sentences "Yagami believes that Light killed people" and "Yagami believes that Yagami's son killed people" claim different things, as in Quine's view. (I may be getting the people wrong in this example, as I don't really remember the plot of Death Note.) Isn't that the very property you were trying to eliminate?azhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07958774692876665402noreply@blogger.com