On 10/15/2014 7:25 PM, Platonist Guitar Cowboy wrote:
On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:00 AM, meekerdb <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Bruno seems to think that if you fail to believe in the existence of Santa
Claus you
must have a definite idea of what "Santa Claus" refers to and therefore you
do
believe in Santa Claus. A curious inference for a logician.
That's just fancy language, wherein semantic of "Santa" is mapped to "fictitious entity,
old, fat, gift giving etc"; so you applying belief predicate to it results in believing
untrue fiction.
What's more curious than this is why you choose "Santa" instead of "house" or "Brent" in
your example.
But roughly I'd say yes, to negate some proposition you have to know semantic it refers
to and point to/represent that idea, with all its possible flaws, and note said
negation. And that isn't curious, I'd call it normal because I can't think of some
inversion before I have a grasp on some usual state of affairs. PGC
I works with "house" and "Brent" too. What's curious is that failing to believe in
anything implies that you do believe in it. I suppose it goes along with the spirit of
"everything". If I can think of it clearly enough to fail to believe it exists then it
must be among the the everything that exists.
Brent
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