> One of the cuter illustrations of this: There's an old test > for telling whether someone is a scientist/engineer or one > of those humanities types. You ask them "If you call a tail > a leg, how many legs does a dog have?" > The answer, of course, is "Four, because calling a tail a > leg doesn't make it one." (At which point the humanities > types all get indignant. ;-)
Unfortunately for that reasoning, this riddle (given the same answer) comes from the _Sophismata_ of Jehan Buridan (d.1358) which a fair number of your "humanities types" will know of. Buridan used donkeys rather than dogs for his examples. The idea of distinguishing conditional from categorical definition possibly comes from Ockham; Ockham's _Summa Logicae_ at one point talks about definitions of non-existent things, like chimaeras - as he says, what these amount to is saying what a chimaera would have to be if there were such things, and are to be distinguished from the type of definition that is seriously intended to imply that what it defines exists. He anticipated Russell's theory of descriptions here. In turn, Ockham credits Priscian with this part of the theory of definition; I've never read either Priscian or an account of his work. Whether (or which) definitions had ontological consequences was a hot issue for early mediaeval philosophy as a result of Anselm's Ontological Argument for the existence of God. I don't think Ockham or Buridan would have been very impressed by it (there's no surviving comment on it by either) but it must have put them on the spot and they'd have had to come up with some sort of theoretical framework to deal with it. The dog/donkey riddle isn't much of a refutation in itself, but it might be used as part of one. As John Walsh says, the riddle is often attributed to Lincoln. It's quite possible that Lincoln heard it in law school, since the law continued to use the analytical methods of mediaeval logic and semantics long after the philosophers had forgotten about them. (The philosophers changed their minds sharpish in the twentieth century when they realized they'd got themselves into a variety of semantical messes that a bit of mediaevalist precision might have obviated). It's odd that mediaeval Western philosophers did so little work on the conceptual structure of music. Their methods should have been able to deal with it, and the history of music might have been substantially different if they'd tried. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
