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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
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References: <3b0176$hu8@mp.cs.niu.edu> <1994Nov24.121032.27675@oxvaxd> <CzsKqx.Gon@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca>
Date: Fri, 25 Nov 1994 18:36:04 GMT
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In article <CzsKqx.Gon@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>In article <1994Nov24.121032.27675@oxvaxd>,  <econrpae@vax.oxford.ac.uk> wrote:
>>Was the property of being made out of gold a subjective property
>>until chemists formulated scientific tests of goldhood?
>>
>Yes. This is exactly the point. When chemists formulated scientific tests of
>goldhood, they at the same time changed the content of the term. Before 
>"gold" was something which had such and such properties and other substances,
>as long as they showed these properties, were "gold" too. 

That's one way of seeing it.  But why can't we also see it like this:

(a) People thought the other substances were gold (or perhaps we cay
    they called them "gold"), but those substances turned out not to
    be gold after all.

I'd find it odd if we *couldn't* legitimately say (a).  Suppose
people counted "fool's gold" as gold in the past.  Surely it's
possible to meaningfully say they were wrong.

Now, you might question whether they were wrong by their own
lights.  Perhaps they counted all this stuff as gold and had
to chose, when certain tests came along, whether they should
still count it all as gold.  Perhaps that's how they saw it.
But they might well have thought themselves that they'd been
mistaken.

In any case, for a given version of "gold", why is it subjective
whether something is gold in that sense?  Is a change in the
meaning of "gold" the only possiblity?  Surely not.  Surely 
someone could think something was gold and hence (because of
their meaning of "gold") that it had certain properties
and be wrong.

>When chemical test were developed, which differentiated among various things
>called "gold" until then, a decision had to be made to which of these to
>apply the term. Wasn't this decision subjective?

Why would that stop a given notion of gold from referring to
objective properties?

> As you may know, there are
>various types (isotopes) of gold. Which one is "real" gold?
>Again, as in another post, the disagreement can be traced to a philosophical
>stance. Are our clasiffications "objective" or "subjective"?
>May I suggest Lakoff's "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things"?  

An interesting book.

-- jeff
