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TheOtherDave comments on Hedonium's semantic problem - Less Wrong
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This simply means that "an entity that is fat AND jolly AND lives at the North Pole AND delivers presents" shouldn't be chosen as a referent for "Santa". However, there is a particular neural pattern (most likely a set of similar neural patterns, actually) that corresponds to a mental image of "an entity that is fat AND jolly AND lives at the North Pole AND delivers presents"; moreover, this neural pattern (or set of neural patterns) exists across a large fraction of the human population. I'm perfectly fine with letting the word "Santa" refer to this pattern (or set of patterns). Is there a problem with that?
My $0.02...
OK, so let's consider the set of neural patterns (and corresponding artificial signals/symbols) you refer to here... the patterns that the label "Santa" can be used to refer to. For convenience, I'm going to label that set of neural patterns N.
I mean here to distinguish N from the set of flesh-and-blood-living-at-the-North-Pole patterns that the label "Santa" can refer to. For convenience, I'm going to label that set of patterns S.
So, I agree that N exists, and I assume you agree that S does not exist.
You further say:
...in other words, you're fine with letting "Santa" refer to N, and not to S. Yes?
Well, yes, in that I don't think it's possible.
I mean, I think it's possible to force "Santa" to refer to N, and not to S, and you're making a reasonable effort at doing so here. And once you've done that, you can say "Santa exists" and communicate exists(N) but not communicate exists(S).
But I also think that without that effort being made what "Santa exists" will communicate is exists(S).
And I also think that one of the most reliable natural ways of expressing exists(N) but not communicate exists(S) is by saying "Santa doesn't exist."
Put another way: it's as though you said to me that you're perfectly fine with letting the word "fish" refer to cows. There's no problem with that, particularly; if "fish" ends up referring to cows when allowed to, I'm OK with that. But my sense of English is that, in fact, "fish" does not end up referring to cows when allowed to, and when you say "letting" you really mean forcing.
That seems fair. What I was mostly trying to get at was a way to describe Santa without admitting his existence; for instance, I could say, "Santa wears a green coat!" and you'd be able to say, "That's wrong!" without either of us ever claiming that Santa actually exists. In other words, we would be communicating information about N, but not S.
More generally speaking, this problem usually arises whenever a word has more than one meaning, and information about which meaning is being used when is conveyed through context. As usual, discussion of the meaning of words leaves out a lot of details about how humans actually communicate (for instance, an absolutely enormous amount of communication occurs through nonverbal channels). Overloaded words occur all the time in human communication, and Santa just happens to be one of these overloaded words; it occasionally refers to S, occasionally to N. Most of the time, you can tell which meaning is being used, but in a discussion of language, I agree I was being imprecise. The concept of overloading a word just didn't occur to me at the time I was typing my original comment, for whatever reason.
(nods) Yes, agreed with all of this.
And it is admittedly kind of funny that I can say "Superman is from Krypton, not from Vulcan!" and be understood as talking about a fictional character in a body of myth, but if I say "Superman really exists" nobody understands me the same way (though in the Superman mythos, Superman both really exists and is from Krypton). A parsing model that got that quirk right without special-case handling would really be on to something.
The Sense/Reference distinction handles this all out of the box, without the assumption that only certain words have double meanings.
Eg the, the correct sense of Superman is being from Krypton. But Superman has no referent...is fictional , does not exist.
It also forces you to reject objects in virtual reality as "real".
News to me. How?
A way to communicate Exists(N) and not Exists(S) in a way that doesn't depend on the context of the current conversation might be ""Santa" exists but Santa does not." Of course, the existence of "Santa" is granted when "Santa does not exist" is understood by the other person, so this is really just a slightly less ambiguous way of saying "Santa does not exist"
Slightly.
Yes, The not-exists(S) is explicit, in "there is no Santa ", the exists(N) is implicit in the fact that listener and speaker understood each other.