Re: another crack at 'information resource'

On Mon, Nov 8, 2010 at 8:17 PM, Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> wrote:
>
> Hmm. Not sure if you mean to cast your net this widely, but there are plenty of counterexamples to this as a general principle. A particular photograph of an artwork might well be credited to (and owned by) the photographer, not the artist of the original work. Prints of engravings vary enormously in price depending on whether they were pulled by the artist or by someone else from the artist's plates: often it takes arcane expertise to be able to tell them apart. Im sure there are similar examples from the worlds of music and other arts.

Suppose we are talking about some book, say Pale Fire by Nabokov,
about its prose style, wit, length, etc., but have never needed to
discuss anything about the particular physical copies each of us has
in hand. I may not even know what language your copy is written in.
Suddenly you say "and it's cheap - I only paid $2000 for it" -
something I can't corroborate. I'm completely baffled by this until,
after a long and confusing conversation, we finally figure out that by
"Pale Fire" you meant your particular signed copy of it, not the book
in general.

I think a linguist would tell you that this scenario will not happen
with ordinary competent speakers of English. You would have said "*my
copy* was cheap". The price is simply not a property of Pale Fire. If
you try to formalize this, you'll have three distinct individuals:
Pale Fire, my copy of it, and your copy of it.

Received on Monday, 8 November 2010 22:46:32 UTC