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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 20:25:36 GMT
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In article <CzzrLH.93H@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca> pindor@gpu.utcc.utoronto.ca (Andrzej Pindor) writes:
>In article <Czu6C4.30z@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
>Jeff Dalton <jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>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.
>>
>This discussion raged in c.a.p. not so long ago. I am really puzzled how
>you can hold such a view. When people had no way of distinguishing between
>gold and fool's gold, what sense does it make to say that they only mistakenly
>thought that fool's gold was gold?? 

They might have been mistaken or not, depending on how they thought
of gold.  For instance, they may have had some canonical / paradigmatic
examples of gold and thought fool's gold was the same stuff.  On
further investigation (maybe they tried to make a ring out of some
fool's gold) they may have discovered a difference and realized
they'd been mistaken.

OTOH, perhaps what they meant by "gold" was anything that had a
certain look.  In that case, they might well have been right to
regard gold and fool's gold as both being gold.  (However, that
does nothing to show that "the property of being made out of gold"
was then subjective.)

>They used the word 'gold' for a substance 
>with given properties. 

Not necessarily.  They may not have had a full and specific list in mind.
They may have had (or had in addition) the idea that gold included
everything that was of the same kind as certain canonical / paradigmatic
examples, where some properties of that stuiff were still to be
determined.  That is, they might investigate further stuff and find
out more about it.

>How do you know that in fact they did not mean mica
>(fool's gold) but due to a mistake the person who invented a method of
>distinguishing between them used the word gold for this other substance?

I don't.  That's a possibility, but not the only possibility.

>Unless, in a pure Platonic fashion you assume that we are inborn with 
>the notion of 'gold', 

Nope, that has nothing to do with it.

>Even in prehistoric times, people refering to something as "gold"
>meant the substance with a specific atomic weight, is this so?

I rather doubt that anyone in prehistoric times was speaking
English.  But if we suppose that they had a word, G, that is
correctly translated as gold then, to the extent that the
translation is exact they were referring to the substance with
the same properties we now assign to gold (though they had not
yet discovered, or if you prefer, invented some of those
properties).

>As you know, any element (gold including) have several varieties called
>isotops. Are all gold isotops 'gold'? If not, which is "real gold"?

I would assume that they all count as gold, hence the phrase "isotopes
of gold".

>If so, why? 

I think it's a fact about English.

>They are not, from physical point of view, the same
>substance since they differ slightly in their properties.

I think this is down in the noise so far as the present issues
are concerned.

>Assume that some alien beings had a sense of taste which allowed them to 
>distinguish different isotopes of gold and conseqently, they considered them
>different substances. Which one would we translate as 'gold'? Would they be 
>wrong considering them different, because 'gold' is (?) any isotope or their 
>mixture?

It depends on what you want to accomplish with the translation.
If I wanted to convey a greater sense of how things seemed to
them, I'd use several different terms, none of them "gold".

>>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.
>>
>No, it is not possible, as argued above. We cannot legitimately say (a).

Why not?  Some fools may have been wrong, at least.  In any case,
I suggested one way to make sense of (a) at the start of this message.

>>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.
>>
>??? This is completly different if you think that something has specific
>properties and you are wrong. What we were discussing is a situation when
>something is identified by its properties and then, by introducing more 
>properties, the class is divided into two or more classes. The name of the
>original class is now used only to one subclass. Claiming that the previous
>use of the class name was on occasion wrong (because applied to members of
>a subclass, which is later given a different name) is (a Platonic) nonsense.

But that is not what I claimed.  What I said was:

  someone could think something was gold and hence (because of
  their meaning of "gold") that it had certain properties
  and be wrong

And that is definitely possible.  Take their meaning of gold
and the properties they think gold has.  Introduce some stuff
that they think is gold (ie they think it has those properties)
but which actually does not have all of the properties.
They may then doscover that it lacks some of the properties
and hence that they were wrong about it being gold.

>>>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?
>>
>What do you mean? Which objective properties? Those of what is now known as
>'gold' or those of what is now known as "fool's gold"? 

Pick whichever one you'd like.

>   The point is that 
>there is no objective reason why the term referring to the original class
>(gold) should be applied to one subclass and not to the other. 

But that does nothing to show that the properties associated
with the term "gold" were not objective properties.  Suppose
we have a change in the meaning of "gold".  Different properties
go with the term before the change than after.  But all of
those properties might be objective.

Now if the point is only that there's no objective reason why
"gold" (that sequence of letters, or that sound) must mean one
thing (what we now call "gold", say) rather than another (fig
newtons, perhaps, or our-gold-plus-fools-gold), then there must
be much clearer ways to make it.

>>> 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.
>>
>It certainly is, but it seems that you have not taken to heart (or mind :-))
>what it says.

Well, do you agree with its use of Putnam's "cats and cherries"
argument, just for instance, or could you at least allow that someone
might reasonably disagree?  In short, is it perhaps permitted to disagree
with Lakoff?

-- jd
