Re: Use/Mention

[auerbach@xxxxxxxx (David Auerbach)]

On 01/17/97 at 06:08 AM,
  Harry Binswanger  said (in so many words):

<- Hey David--whatever happened to my ages-ago philosophical posting to
<- David A. regarding the philosophic use/misuse of this distinction?

I remember it, but not its content very well. Something about stipulating
names? Let's see, ah yes, I pointed out that in some logic texts some
symbols were used as their own names whilst in others the actual symbols of
the object language never appeared. This last style has much to recommend
it--after all a book about some logical systems need not exhibit the
systems themselves anymore than a book about entymology need have bugs in
it. And then I pointed out (this is all from hazy memory, so ...) that in
thinking about the semantics of the xywrite keyboard table it was best to
think of the single letters as naming themselves (and indeed that is the
operational semantics of the kbd interpreter--if it sees a single symbol
entry that is contrued as a name of itself, whereas two symbol entries are
names of operations).  Then you had some objection that I confess I
forget. I'll say this though: Assigning names to things is essentially
stipulative (although often social and constrained and, in the case of
notational systems like numerals, subject to formal constraints): my
parents stipulated that my name would be 'David'. If I want to give a
symbolic object a name I could use the general mechanism of single quotes
(thusly: ' 'David' ' contains 5 letters and one pair of quote marks) or the
retail method of stipulating a name: let the first sentence of this
paragraph be called 'Zelda'. Then: Zelda contains 10 words. The advantage
of the single quote method is that calculating the referent from the name
is trivial. Similar advantages adhere to the method of using a symbol as
its own name. So I can use 'a' as the name of 'a' (although I didn't just
now, for clarity.)

It is easy to get confused about this; I haven't even gotten into the use
of variables.


--
                     Regards,
                     David

Bad cooks...have delayed human development longest and impaired it most.
                --Nietzsche

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David Auerbach              auerbach@xxxxxxxx (David Auerbach)
Department of Philosophy & Religion
NCSU
Box 8103
Raleigh, 27695-8103
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