Rick, (01)
I'm only skimming so may have missed it, but I would have been quite
interested in your response to the idea, implicit in Marcus Hutter's
work, and perhaps also Schmidhuber's, that compression (of text in
particular) can serve as a useful model for "meaning". (02)
Chris Menzel and Pat Hayes: If you see no problem with formal logic as
a model for "meaning", then you will have difficultly understanding a
solution for those problems. I suggest you continue to limit yourself
to problems for which formal logic is appropriate. (03)
However, Chris, in the spirit of providing more information, let me
mention that whether or not it is true as you say that "few
contemporary philosophers believe there are serious problems with
analyticity", the same is less true of linguistics, in your words that
"Most contemporary philosophers of language and logic do not share
Quine's general skepticism about these notions." To give one recent
example: (04)
http://www.grsampson.net/AGwg.html (05)
'In a natural language, one speaks of "analytic statements" which are
true by virtue of their meaning (that is, they can be inferred from
the empty set of premises), versus "synthetic statements" whose
meaning does not give us their truth-value – we need one or more
factual premises before we can establish whether a synthetic statement
is true or false.... (06)
>From the Second World War onwards, a central preoccupation of
English-speaking philosophy (I believe it would be fair to say "the
central preoccupation") was language, and the central point about
language as actually used in everyday life ("ordinary language") was
that there is in fact no distinction between the analytic and the
synthetic.' (07)
'Earlier in my own career I accepted Wittgenstein's and Quine's
arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, but I believed
that grammar was different: I supposed that there really is a
well-defined set of valid English sentences, although definite rules
prescribing how we can move inferentially among them do not exist.
More recently, I have come to see the grammatical/ungrammatical
distinction as resembling the analytic/synthetic distinction: they are
inventions imposed without scientific basis on intrinsically fluid
realities.' (08)
-Rob (09)
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