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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Strong AI and consciousness
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Date: Tue, 29 Nov 1994 19:12:17 GMT
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In article <D000q2.8pn@spss.com> markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
>In article <Czu6C4.30z@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>>><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.
>
>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, ..."
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.  In the former case, it depends
on just what properties are in the list.

> they were correct in
>applying the term "gold" according to their definition to both substances;

That depends on what their definition was.

>(All this is assuming that people really had no way of distinguishing 
>fool's gold from the element gold, which I suspect is false.

My suggestion (above) is that they may not have had one to hand
but may nonetheless have been capable of developing one.

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.  

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.

-- jeff
