[Ads-l] qoty possible

Sun Mar 27 14:30:58 UTC 2022

I vote that D, E, and G are bachelors.

JL

On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 11:01 PM ADSGarson O'Toole <
adsgarsonotoole at gmail.com> wrote:

> The mention of category membership and "bachelor" reminded me of an
> influential article by computer scientist Terry Winograd that I heard
> about when I began learning about artificial intelligence many years
> ago.
>
> Year: 1976
> Journal: Revue Internationale de Philosophie
> Volume 30, Number 117/118
> Article: Towards a Procedural Understanding of Semantics
> Author: Terry Winograd
> Start Page 260, Quote Page 276
> Database: JSTOR
>
> https://www.jstor.org/stable/23943134
>
> [Begin excerpt – check for typos]
> Consider the following exchange:
> Host: I’m having a big party next weekend. Do you know any nice
> bachelors I could invite?
> Friend: Yes, l know this fellow X . . .
>
> The problem is to decide, given the facts below, for which values of X
> the response would be a reasonable answer in light of the normal
> meaning of the word “bachelor”. A simple test is to ask for which ones
> the host might fairly complain “You lied. You said X was a bachelor”:
>
> A: Arthur has been living happily with Alice for the last five years,
> They have a two year old daughter, and have never officially married.
>
> B: Bruce was going to be drafted, so he arranged with his friend
> Barbara to have a justice of the peace marry them so he would be
> exempt. They have never lived together. He dates a number of women,
> and plans to have the marriage annulled as soon as he finds someone he
> wants to marry.
>
> C: Charlie is 17 years old. He lives at home with his parents and is
> in high school.
>
> D: David is 17 years old. He left home at 13, started a small
> business, and is now a successful young entrepreneur leading a
> playboy’s life style in his penthouse apartment.
>
> E: Eli and Edgar are homosexual lovers who have been living together
> for many years.
>
> F: Faisal is allowed by the law of his native Abu Dhabi to have three
> wives. He currently has two and is interested in meeting another
> potential fiance.
>
> G: Father Gregory is the bishop of the Catholic cathedral at Groton upon
> Thames.
> [End excerpt]
>
> Garson
>
> On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 8:24 PM Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>
> wrote:
> >
> > Some time ago (in the 1970s, to be more or less precise) Hilary Putnam
> > argued persuasively for what he calls the division of linguistic labor,
> > which among other things makes the point that the extension of natural
> kind
> > terms (like "tiger", "water", or "whale", or "gold") is determined by
> > "experts" in the relevant field within the linguistic
> > community--zoologists, chemists, botanists, whatever. And that the result
> > is more like an encyclopedia entry than a true definition of the kind
> > available for "one-criterion" words in which there are necessary and
> > sufficient conditions for category membership like "bachelor" or
> > "touchdown".  His idea is that we can have theories about what it takes
> for
> > something to be water or a whale, for example, and that these theories
> can
> > change over time without the "definition" changing. We can discover we
> were
> > wrong about water being an element, or a whale being a large fish, but we
> > can't discover that a touchdown really countis for 5 points or that
> > bachelors were really secretly married all along.  For natural kind
> terms,
> > as he puts it in the title of one of his papers, "meanings ain't in the
> > head"--to know that something is or isn't an X, or an instance of X, is
> not
> > to have the relevant concept. (Saul Kripke provides parallel arguments
> for
> > proper names not having true meanings.) It's plausible that biological
> > theories of "woman" (to the extent that this is a natural kind term)
> would
> > be a case in point.
> >
> > LH
> >
> > On Sat, Mar 26, 2022 at 6:38 PM Peter Reitan <pjreitan at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > > Do biologists get to define words, or linguists?
> > > ________________________________
> > > From: American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> on behalf of
> Mark
> > > Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM>
> > > Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2022 12:03:44 AM
> > > To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > > Subject: Re: qoty possible
> > >
> > > ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > > -----------------------
> > > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > > Poster:       Mark Mandel <markamandel at GMAIL.COM>
> > > Subject:      Re: qoty possible
> > >
> > >
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > >
> > > Fair enough!
> > >
> > > MAM
> > >
> > > On Fri, Mar 25, 2022, 12:55 PM Bill Mullins <amcombill at hotmail.com>
> wrote:
> > >
> > > > Ketanji Brown Jackson Mar 22, 2022.
> > > >
> > > > When asked if she can provide a definition of the word "woman," she
> say's
> > > > she can't, "I'm not a biologist."
> > > >
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