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On Wed. Jan. 16, 2008, at 9:18 PM, Pat Hayes
wrote:
At 4:32 PM -0500 1/16/08, Deborah MacPherson wrote:
PH>>>RE: ......is there any kind of thing that could NOT be a
context, or part of a context, in this third sense? Or can a context be
anything, or perhaps any set of any things? If (as I suspect) the latter, then
this is not a definition of anything, as it does not identify any actual
category. - Pat Hayes
DM>>Hi Pat, can you please explain why the identification of an
actual category is the ultimate or preferred result of well-defined context
(whether words or "any collection of things").
PH> Not sure I understand the question. The identification of a category
is what a definition does. The category in question is
"context".
PH> Heres my point, let me illustrate it with a
parable. Joe comes along and says, we need to discuss foodles. Its important to
have a general theory of foodles. And I say, hmm, what are foodles? And Joe
says, everything is a foodle.
PH>At this point, I conclude that what Joe wants is
impossible, because there isn't anything useful to be said that applies to
everything. Anything non-trivial will be true of some things and false of
others: it will divide the universe into examples and non-examples. It will be a
category.
PH> Do you see the point?
I think Joe might not have said that everything is
a foodle, but that anything may be foodle. And he might say
that it is not a category but a member of a relation between
two sets of things. He may say it was like the figure and the ground
of perceptual psychology. We can not define any fixed category "ground" by
your criteria either, could we?. Everything may at some point in time be
the ground to some figure, and everything may be the figure, but nothing may be
both the figure and the ground at once. What matters is the relation between the
two.
To switch back to the topic at hand, anything may be context,
or anything may be the focus, but nothing may be both the focus and the context
at once.
However, for what its worth, to fully capture my own
intuitions about it, speaking of sets, there must be one set that is in
focus, and at least two sets that are (possible) contexts. If there
were a focus set and only one other set, we would not call the second,
non-focus set a "context", we would call it the foundation, or cause, or
conditions of the focus set. Furthermore, a context set must, when
held in relation to the focus set, force differences in the truth,
interpretation, or perception of the focus set, and these differences must
be different for each context set.
In other words, my intuition says that in this case: (ist
today (and A (not A))), today is not a valid context for that tautology because
there is no other context, which if it took the place of "today", would change
the value of that tautology. This is pragmatic, to count as a context it must
make a difference, and there must be an alternative context that makes a
different difference. For example, to me right now, 'yesterday' is a valid
context, because I can think of things that are different between that interval
and 'today'. But 'yesterday-10:32am-to-10:42am' is not a valid context
because I cannot think of anything (without further investigation) that
falls into that particular interval. So it holds nothing different, for
me, than 'today' or 'yesterday', even though I would think it
should be subsumed into 'yesterday'.
John
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