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John: > And Rosta scripsit: > > > Similarly, the answer to whether a nonmale or nonwhite *could* be a > > US President determines whether Mr US P is a subkind of Mr White Male. > > On what grounds? Because Kinds (and properties) exist by virtue of abstract definition, not by virtue of the contingent facts of the local world. Is "white male" part of the definition of what it is to be US President? To answer that, you ask whether a nonwhite or nonmale could ever count as being a US President. > > And compare with whether someone not born in the US could be president: > > I'd say that if the answer to that were Yes, then the nature of US P > > would be altered, and we'd be dealing with a different Kind. > > So you hold that Mr. Subject-of-George-VI came to an end in 1947 and was > replaced by a new, distinct Mr. Subject-of-George-VI which no longer > included millions of Indian and Pakistani nationals? That's a complicated issue. I propose the following solution: when a Kind changes (by virtue of its definition changing), we set up a Superkind, which embodies the commonality between the before and after definitions, with the before and after definitions each associated with a subkind of the superkind. Rather like amoeboid reproduction (I forget the technical term for it). > > And the answer to whether a black swan would be a true swan would > > determine whether Mr Swan is a subkind of Mr White. > > They are swans all right. The question is whether it would be wrong to > deny that Mr. Bluebird is a subkind of Mr. Blanu merely because some non-blue > bluebirds might be discovered eventually. I think it would definitely be wrong. Must a bluebird be blue? No. Must a bluebird be a bird? Yes. -- According to my definitions of bluebirdhood. What if we discover that bluebirds aren't, zoologically, birds? Then we will have amoeboid splitting of Mr Bluebird into Mr Bluebird1 (a subkind of Mr Bird) and into Mr Bluebird2 (not a subkind of Mr Bird); with each a subkind of Mr Bluebird (which isn't a subkind of Mr Bird). > > And I would not accept that Mr Lojbanist is a subkind of Mr Anglophone, > > Suppose that no non-anglophone Lojbanists ever came into existence. From > your seat in Milliways (the restaurant at the end of the universe), would > you then persist in your rejection? Yes. A Kind owes its existence to a definition, not to any contingent facts about the universe, and the definition need not be based on contingent facts about the universe. That's why we can have Kinds with no avatars in the world, and therefore why Kinds solve all those intensional problems. --And.