On Feb 18, 2:03 pm, "Stephen Paul King" <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > -----Original Message----- > From: 1Z > Sent: Friday, February 18, 2011 7:04 AM > To: Everything List > Subject: Re: Maudlin & How many times does COMP have to be false before its > > false? > > >>On Feb 17, 8:52 pm, benjayk <[email protected]> wrote: > > snip > >> Probably I should just say that every word has a referent. > [1Z] > >Clearly not, e.g unicorn. > > [SPK] > > I invite you to read a good book on Semiotic Theory, such as that of > Umberto Ecco. The point is that even the word "unicorn" has a referent, even > if that referent is some imagination. Is a cartoon drawing of a horse with a > single horn protruding from its head not recognized as a unicorn?
It's a picture of unicorn. Which is to say, it is an individual of the type <picture>. It cannot be said that unicorns exist because pictures of them do. If we are > going to literally and seriously argue that only nouns can refer to actual > physical entities, That isn't the argument at all. The argument is that what a word's reference, if it has one, is indicated by it's sense. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_reference Words like "thought", "memory" have mental referents because their senses make it clear they are meant to refer to mental entities. "Unicorn" has the sense of a kind of four legged animal: if no such animal can be found, it can't be taken to refer to something else (such as picture or concept) because that would break the sense-reference link > then we are disallowing for any conversations regarding > the dearly departed or anything that is out of sensory range of the > conversants (among many more). You seem to be assuming that reference exhausts meaning. But conversations about fictive, hypothetical or defunct entities are still meaningful because the terms involved have Sense. > Referents do not need to be autonomously instantiated as physical beings > to be referents. Following the same reasoning numbers do not need to exist > as autonomous entities either, all that is really required is that > interlocutors can comprehend each other's implied meanings. All that is required for what? That mathematicians understand each other is not a sufficient condition for Platonism > We seem to be > having another instance of the debate between nominalism and universalism... > Parenthetically, what does this have to do with the subject of Maudlin > and COMP's veracity? Platonism -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list?hl=en.
