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Re: SUO: Re: Comments on Whitten's Starter Ontology




Jon wrote:
> From this POV, propositional expressions are just notations
> for boolean-valued functions f : X -> B, where B = {0, 1}.

Jon, intuitively, what is X here?  I can't help but notice the formal
similarity of your suggestion to the standard account of propositions
(i.e., semantic values of propositional variables) in the possible
worlds semantics for propositional logic, where X is just the set of
possible worlds (or, more intuitively perhaps, possible contexts).
The idea is that a sentence expresses a function from contexts to
truth values.  Intuitively, then, an assertion of a sentence in a
given context yields truth or falsity, depending on the context.  Is
this your idea?  Sorta?

Regards,

-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