> In my (leetle) world, referential opacity refers to ambiguities that arise > in intentional utterances ... utterances of the form, "Jones believes > (wants, thinks, hopes, etc.) that X is the case. " They are opaque in that > they tell us nothing about the truth of X. So, for instance, "Jones > believes that there are unicorns in central park" tells us neither that > such a thing as a horse with a horn in its forehead exists (because Jones > may confuse unicorns with squirrels) or that there are any "unicorns" in > central park, whatever Jones may conceive them to be (because Jones may be > misinformed). > > > > What does the computer community think "referential opacity" means.
If they're at all like whatever community W. V. O. Quine belonged to (mathematical logicians? empiricist philosophers?), they think it means something quite other than what you wrote above. --Actually, all I know for sure is that what Quine meant by "opacity of reference" was quite incompatible with your meaning of "referential opacity". His standard example of "opacity of reference" was the pair of phrases "the morning star", "the evening star", both of which *in fact* refer to precisely the same celestial body, viz., Venus, although the facticity of that fact may be opaque to any given speaker of the two phrases. ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
