- From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
- Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 16:57:56 -0400
- To: Marc de Graauw <marc@marcdegraauw.com>
- Cc: 'Pat Hayes' <phayes@ihmc.us>, 'John Cowan' <cowan@ccil.org>, 'Technical Architecture Group WG' <www-tag@w3.org>
Marc de Graauw scripsit:
> Pat, you take "about" in a much too referential way. As Frege pointed out, words
> can have sense and reference, and you take "about" to mean "has a referent".
> "Bilbo Baggins" has a sense but no reference, but it's a perfectly legitimate
> question to ask what you know *about* Bilbo, such as his being Frodo's uncle
> etc. And one thing you know *about* Bilbo is that he has no referent. Answering
> "I know nothing about Bilbo" is simply false (assuming you know something about
> Tolkien's works).
Thank you for putting it that way; that is just what I meant. (Minor
note: Frege said that names have no sense, but I think that's false;
"Fido" has the sense "dog", for instance.)
--
John Cowan cowan@ccil.org http://ccil.org/~cowan
In computer science, we stand on each other's feet.
--Brian K. Reid
Received on Tuesday, 25 September 2007 20:58:16 UTC