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From: rjc@aipna.ed.ac.uk (Richard Caley)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Fun with the semantics of paradox
Message-ID: <522@aipna.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 8 Feb 89 06:34:07 GMT
References: <479@aipna.ed.ac.uk> <3038@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu> <43843@linus.UUCP>
Reply-To: rjc@uk.ac.ed.aipna (Richard Caley)
Organization: Dept. of AI, Edinburgh, UK
Lines: 52
Dragon: Mnemouth

In article <43843@linus.UUCP> bwk@mbunix.mitre.org (Barry Kort) writes:
>Let's play with the assertion,

>	"The current king of France is bald."

>If we put this into symbolic logic notation, we get

>	For all x, if x is the current king of France, then x is bald.

Says who?

I certainly would not take this as a valid translation.

Apart from anything else, the second sentence contains all the problems
of the first, it is of the form

	\/x (x=King) -> bald(x)

Which is, of course equivalent to

	bald(King)

However This is just hiding the problem ( the definite reference to an
non existent entity ) behind a layer of verbage.

	"The Current King of France" 

Still does not refer, so, in the above FOPC, the constant 'King' has a
somewhat strange status.

Now, if you are takeing "the current king of France" to be a description
( on a par with 'blue' ) which I can just about see, then your
translation does not mean the same thing as the original - since it now
describes a property of a set ( the set of entities which are "the
current king of France" ) rather than an individual.  This is less
problematical since an empty set is a perfectly straght forward object. 

If one really doesn't want to bring in possible worlds, then I believe
that the only alternative is to say the sentence is 'odd' in some way (
meaningless being another way of saying 'odd' ). The sentence does not
have a meaning in its own right since if it was used by someone the
natural responce by a well informed English speaker would not have any
relationship to the assertion made by this sentence, one would deny the
presupposition. 

>--Barry Kort

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