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From: markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
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References: <CzsKqx.Gon@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> <Czu6C4.30z@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D000q2.8pn@spss.com> <D01MoH.Ir9@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 30 Nov 1994 19:01:00 GMT
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In article <D01MoH.Ir9@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>>Suppose people counted "fool's gold" as gold in the past.  Surely it's
>>>possible to meaningfully say they were wrong.
>>
>>Surely it's not.  What does it mean to say that they were wrong?  That
>>they were mistaken in their beliefs, right?  But if they thought that
>>fool's gold was the same as what we would call gold (the element Au),
>>there is no belief of theirs which was incorrect;
>
>It depends on how they thought of gold.  For instance, did they
>have it as "anything with the following properties: P1, P2, ..."

In which case, if P1, P2, ... did not distinguish gold from fool's gold,
they cannot be said to have been wrong.

>Or was it "anything like this stuff in my ring, these coins in
>that chest over there, etc"?  In the latter case, they would
>have been wrong about fool's gold and may well have been able
>to figure out a convenient test.  

You can't just say "it's gold if it's *like* that stuff there"; you have
to have some notion, even if you can't express it propositionally, of 
*how much* likeness is required.  And again, if the amount of likeness
included fool's gold, it can't be said that this belief was wrong.
You can't sneak in "made of the same element" into the medieval definition
of "gold" under cover of the word "like".

>In any case, it seems to me that if you start to think their "gold"
>might be such that they weren't wrong to regard fool's gold as gold,
>then you must also start to think that out term "gold" is a rather
>imperfect translation of theirs.  

Welcome to the world of historical semantics.  Yep, words change their
meaning, and one can grossly misread an old text by supplying modern
meanings where they don't belong.  It's not a situation that increases
one's confidence in words having absolute and objective meanings.

>So was the property of being made out of gold (their notion)
>a subjective property?  I don't see why.  If the content of
>the term changed, it could be an objective property both
>before and after the change -- it would just have to be a
>different property.

Curious that you say so when you yourself suggested above that the meaning
of "gold" might have been defined by likeness to some physical exemplars.
That being made of element Au is an objective property I can accept;
that being "like" something else is objective I find dubious in the extreme.
