pictures and symbols describe scenarios in very different ways. for example, in a comic book frame, a picture of a person does indicate that there is a person who looks pretty much like the person in the picture; but the presence of a speech balloon does not indicate that there is a large white round object floating above the person’s head.  the question i want to address here is: how do these radically different representational devices co-ordinate to deliver meaning together? (more…)

This is terrible.

Article here

“Aristotle… presents arguments for the existence of an eternally actual unmoved mover of the outermost sphere of the cosmos.  This is the god of his metaphysical system, and is identified with thought thinking itself.”

- Alan Code, “Aristotle’s Logic and Metaphysics”

A four-hour skype conversation with DJ Fadereu last night was as stimulating and mind-bending as ever. In the course, F. announced his newest project, “Oriyana.” Oriyana, a contraction of “origami yana”, “will be a radical and minimalist astronautical design.” The plan? Send a radio controlled helium balloon to the farthest reaches of earth’s atmosphere– eventually, as the helium expands, the balloon will explode. But just before the moment of explosion, a mechanical arm will fire a paper airplane from the side of the balloon— and free from the gravitational pull of the earth, the paper airplane will sail through space, “propelled by purely interplanetary phenomenon, that is - gravity and solar wind”, and into the Moon.

Propositional attitude ascriptions display something which is usually called “de re/de dicto” ambiguity. For example,

(1) John believes that Frank is ugly.

can be true in two very different situations:

(1d) John has the belief [Frank is ugly].

(1r) John has the belief [that guy in the red shirt is ugly], where the guy in the red shirt is Frank.

Normally, the candidate de dicto belief entails the candidate de re belief, so you might think this is just a case of under-determination. The evidence for genuine ambiguity is that, in a situation where (1r) is the case but (1d) is not the case, there is, intuitively, a way to read (1) in which is it is true, and also a way to read (1) in which it is false. (Other evidence has to do with non-existants… but this is more complicated.)

What’s going on here? More or less, when a name appears in the “scope” of a propositional attitude ascription to X, its ambiguous whether this name should be read as component of X’s beliefs, or part of the speaker’s description of X’s beliefs. Put another way:

Perspectival Ambiguity. De Re/De Dicto ambiguity in propositional attitude contexts is a function of an option to take either the the ascriber’s perspective or the ascribee’s perspective when evaluating the target proposition.

That’s my first point. (I’m not making any claims about the originality of these points– I’m just making them.) My second point is that the ambiguity is completely ubiquitous within propositional attitude contexts, and not at all restricted to names. Here’s an illustration with respect to color terms. Suppose (following Fodor) that Granny’s favorite color is white, but John doesn’t know this. And suppose John believes that all swans are white. Then there is a sense in which it is true to say:

(2) John believes that all swans are Granny’s favorite color.

(If you’re suspicious of the alleged true reading here, a bit of context may help… I’ll try to think of something convincing.)

So too for verbs… You and I discover that falling is the same thing as accelerating towards the earth. John doesn’t know this. Yet both of the following could be true:

(3a) John believes the apple fell.

(3b) John believes the apple accelerated towards the earth.

By the way, if you think that beliefs in the head are quite language based, then any attitude ascription in English to someone who doesn’t speak English will be a good example of this…
Finally, I’d like to link all this up with an interesting phenomenon involving tense. (This is the third point.) Suppose we encounter:

(4) At noon yesterday, John believed that Mary was ill.

This is ambiguous: did John believe Mary was ill at noon yesterday, or did he believe she was ill at some time prior to noon? I’d like to suggest that the same perspectival ambiguity is at work here too, with respect to tense. Taking the speaker’s perspective, the past tense of “was” is the same past tense as “believed”; taking John’s perspective, the past tense of “was” was something he believed at that time.

Of course, working this out in formal detail is another matter…

(in my last post the link didn’t work. here’s a correction)

it’s official… Mary Alice Amidon has a blog.  The timing is perfect-in the UK, it was mother’s day last week on Sunday. Hi mom!

d. Land Animals.
(3) Hunting hints.
(c) Moose may be found in heavy brush; they may charge. In the winter, they can be spotted by climbing a hill or tree and looking for the animal’s “smoke” (condensed body vapor which rises like the smoke of a small campfire).
P. 155

Some of you may have read that there’s a bit of drama going on along the Colombian borders these past few days. I have an analysis in today’s Globe and Mail (Canada’s national newspaper!) written with my esteemed colleague/neighbor/born-ten-days-after-me-in-the-same-hospital-in-Montreal, Matthew Stein.

Also in the Globe and Mail today is the apparently international news that Brattleboro Vermont voted to arrest the president (and vice president) should they ever visit Brattleboro. I’m not saying it’s a genius idea, but it’s got a certain ring to it, no?