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Here are a few remarks on what pc wrote: > >The predicate that goes with a name is the device for disambiguating > >names: even "William Backhouse Astor IV" referred to at least two people > >(second cousins, to be sure). So the predicate is one that defines the > >class of things we are can talk about in a given situation -- out of which > >class we pick the named one (see why this is a quantifier -- as are "the" > >and the other edth word). It is not the haeceity of the one we want, but > >merely the class to which that one relevantly belongs for the present > >conversation I think of names as homonymous. So in the onomasticon there are at least two different entries for Wm Backhouse Astor IV, one for the one cousin and another for the other. On that view, the name names the haecceity to the same extent that "mlatu" names cathood. > >Worlds don't need time separately, since worlds are defined temporally > >(which is why subjunctive is so often a tense lexically). That is, every > >world is a node on a tree spread from past to future. Each such node has > >"an infinite" number of successor nodes, each differing from it in at > >least one proposition. But it has only one predecessor node. That is, > >time is line to the past and branching to the future and each possible > >word is on some trunk of this, all going back to at least the Big Bang (or > >rather just before, since it might not have happened or happened later -- > >or earlier, so we go back further still). I think of a world as a totality of spacetime, and the tree as representing where they are the same and where they are different. This means that branches can converge (world that are different and then become the same as one another). > >We can only really make sense > >of ctfs that share a past with our own -- up to a crucial point (defined > >by the "if" clause, typically). which is why "If Socrates were a 17th > >Century Irish washerwoman" is so hard: it is on a different trunk > >altogether (or at least a branch that split off early in the -5th century, > >before our Socrates was born), so we don't know enough about the situation > >(what would 17th Century Ireland be like without there having been > >Socrates before, say). To be sure, there are worlds along that path that > >come to be almost exactly like ours, but the way they get to be has to be > >so different from the way ours came to be, that it is hard to imagine what > >generalizations to apply This applies to what we might call 'possible worlds' (worlds on the same tree as ours) but apparently not to fictional worlds. --And.