> On Jan 19, 2017, at 10:03 AM, John F Sowa <s...@bestweb.net> wrote: > > Five questions on epistemic logic > http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/5qelogic.pdf > <http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/5qelogic.pdf> Loved the C I Lewis quote in that one. So true that precision gets confused with accuracy and utility.
>> "I think that Tom believes Superman is real, but >> Mary knows he's just a character in a story." >> >> This sentence would have four UoDs: (1) the world that includes >> Tom, Mary, and me; (2) the UoD of my thought; (3)the UoD of Tom's >> belief, and (4) the UoD of Mary's knowledge. > > I forgot to mention the universe of discourse of the story. > A translation of that sentence to a version of logic would > require five UoDs. More once you include the problem of time in them. That is “Tom believes” is a general statement that presumably thereby quantifies over Tom’s beliefs over time that are changing. Ditto for Mary and then the intersection of those universes. Throw in the problem of reference and then you end up multiplying universes extensively. That’s because when I refer to something like Superman I don’t typically merely mean the Superman of my or my interlocutor’s understanding but Superman as an independent symbol. That means my reference potentially can span an infinite number of different universes. Effectively that’s all that figures like Derrida were saying, although doing it via a fairly complex immanent criticism. (And making the same point over and over again in more confusing ways) I think it originally all comes out of Peirce and his work on the symbol.
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