Respect goes both ways!

[Larry Trask]

Vidhyanath Rao writes:

[LT]

>> I am completely mystified.  The relation "is the same as" is
>> unquestionably transitive. [Rest of the argument deleted]

> As philosophers have been aware for two or more thounsands of years, this
> argument leads to conclusions which make all science questionable [for one
> extreme example, read Nagarjuna].

> Am I the same person I was when I wrote the previous sentence? After all,
> merely by breathing, the set of atoms that make up me (whatever that
> means) has changed. But if you say yes, by a long chain of equivalences,
> it must follow that I am the same person that I was when I was conceived.
> But was I even a person at that point?

Sure.  I don't dispute this at all.

But the problem does not, I think, lie in the relation itself, which must be
taken as transitive if it is to have any identifiable content -- at least in
a non-fuzzy logic.  The problems only arise when we try to decide whether the
relation can be appropriately applied to entities in the world.

In the case of languages, I have argued that the relation cannot, in general,
be meaningfully applied at all.  The strange and unpalatable consequences
that I have objected to on this list seem to me to derive wholly from the
inappropriate application of this relation to language varieties.

Larry Trask
COGS
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QH
UK

larryt at cogs.susx.ac.uk