Methodological concern: using existing SUO resources
> MW: This is likely. If Kuarto is a car, then existence implies very
> different things than if Kuarto is a person. This is what I mean.
It's "Kuato"; have you still not memorized the script for Total Recall? :-)
I have general methodological concern that your response raises. There
might well be an account of meaning on which the implications (hence the
meaning?) of "Kuato exists" changes depending on who or what Kuato is.
(Perhaps a Russellian sort of account on which (very crudely) names are
truncated descriptions might fit the bill.) But the problem is that your
argument seems to be based only upon intuition, and, no matter how smart
we all are, I don't think we'll make a lot of headway if we just argue
our intuitions.
More generally, methodologically, I think there is a danger here of we
reinventing philosophical wheels. Many of the issues that are relevant
to an SUO are well-understand and extensively discussed and, when
possible, formalized. There is an abundance (something bordering on a
plenum, I should say) of existing resources to draw on: existing
theories of meaning (a vast literature), John S's work, Nicola's work,
Pat's work on time, CYC, other SUO proposals, etc. Whatever their
flaws, these resources give us something tangible and concrete (well,
concrete in an abstract sort of way...) to work with. Somehow we need
a more efficient way of exploiting those resources in constructing a
standard SUO. (A start on this was made at the Heidelberg meeting in
1998, but faltered in part, I suspect, because some of these
methodological issues were not thought through -- not to say that it was
clear ahead of time that they *should*, or even could, have been.)
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (979) 845-8764