Dear John, (01)
We went round this mulberry bush before Christmas, but I'm happy to go round
again if you insist. (02)
> In my previous note, I forgot to comment on the following point:
>
> MW> One of the attractions to me of 4D with possible worlds is that
> > you do not need types, because 4D essentially makes things timeless
> > and unchanging, and possible worlds allows you to deal with the
> > intentional.
>
> There are very strong reasons for distinguishing sets and types,
> independently of your ontology for time and space.
>
> For example, the set of all unicorns (03)
MW: As I have said before this is a non-problem if you use possible worlds,
which I explicitly stated above to try to avoid repeating this discussion. (04)
> and the set of all motherless
> cows happen to be identical, namely the empty set. (05)
MW: The set of all motherless cows does not refer to anything, even in any
possible world, so I am quite happy that that is identical to the empty set,
along with all other things that do not refer, and so are non-sense. (06)
> But their
> definitions are not equivalent. (07)
MW: Well unicorns are fine, but motherless cows does not mean anything, so I
don't care.
>
> There are also many sets that have a type constraint on their members,
> such as the set of all cows in Nebraska. It is very difficult to
> specify that set by enumerating its members, but if you see any cow
> in Nebraska, you immediately know that it is a member of that set. (08)
MW: You do not have to enumerate the members, or go and meet them all. That
is epistemology. Ontology is simply the fact that it is a set. (09)
Regards (010)
Matthew West
Information Junction
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