Vladimir_Nesov comments on A Sketch of an Anti-Realist Metaethics - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Jack 22 August 2011 05:32AM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 23 August 2011 07:17:28PM 0 points [-]

"Directly mentioning" passes the buck of "referring", you can't mention a planet directly, the planet itself is not part of the sentence. I don't see how to make sense of a statement being "unpacked in finite number of recursions down to the lowest level containing no abstractions" (what's "no abstractions", what's "unpacking", "recursions"?).

(I understand the distinction between how the phrases are commonly used, but there doesn't appear to be any fundamental or qualitative distinction.)

Comment author: prase 24 August 2011 12:53:14PM 0 points [-]

There has to be a definition of base terms standing for primitive actions, observations and grammatical words (perhaps by a list, to determine what to put on the list would ideally need some experimental research of human cognition). An "abstraction" is then a word not belonging to the base language defined to be identical to some phrase (possibly infinitely long) and used as an abbreviation thereof. By "unpacking" I mean replacing all abstractions by their definitions.