--- To play with Grice's example,
"Bellerophon rode Pegasus" (p. 123 of "Vacuous Names")
Surely, Bellerophon didn't ride Pegasus. For one, Pegasus "does not, and never has, existed". For the other, neither does or has Bellerophon. (That we know).
Grice of course still wants to say that Bellerophon is not identical with Pegasus (although strictly, for a non-Meinongian, they are, since neither is existent).
Grice notes that an interesting weak notion of identity to allow for this should incorporate, 'it is believed that...'. And keeping in mind what the Greeks did believe (to be the case) I'm not sure this would be too Grecian a thing for a Griceian to adopt.
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well, yes, that sounds fairly Quinean, and in the obvious sense (per descriptions), any statement about mythological entities would be false. Yet...writers ..and philosophers probably said the same about...rockets flying into space, a few centuries ago. So...at some point in time, Bellerophon may indeed ride Pegasus.
ReplyDeletethe name-game becomes rather trivial quickly (as does the holy description chat). Russell did clarify the issue, perhaps--others might say he did so by eradicating plato's heaven (ie scuzi some..."meta", but DefDes seems fairly nominalist to me....)--maybe that was related to Kripke's criticism... not that I approve of Kripke.
Lets not forget Russell apres-Tractatus seemed to nearly reject all of his logical analysis...tho' in a sense he paved the way to goedel and the rest
Thanks for taking up the lead: this actually merits a full blog post. For the time being, something from the wiki:
ReplyDelete"Chrysaor has no myth save that of his birth: from the severed neck of Medusa, who was with child by Poseidon, he and Pegasus both sprang at the moment of her death."
"The Lycian seer Polyeidos told Bellerophon that he would have need of Pegasus. To obtain the services of the untamed winged horse, Polyeidos told Bellerophon to sleep in the temple of Athena. While Bellerophon slept, he dreamed that Athena set a golden bridle beside him, saying "Sleepest thou, prince of the house of Aiolos? Come, take this charm for the steed and show it to the Tamer thy father as thou makest sacrifice to him of a white bull."[11] It was there when he awoke. Bellerophon had to approach Pegasus while it drank from a well; Polyeidos told him which well—the never-failing Pirene on the citadel of Corinth, the city of Bellerophon's birth. Other accounts say that Athena brought Pegasus already tamed and bridled, or that Poseidon the horse-tamer, secretly the father of Bellerophon, brought Pegasus, as Pausanias understood.[12] Bellerophon mounted his steed and flew off to where the Chimera was said to dwell."
There is a point about the subject-predicate that concerns the Pegasus sentence that may discuss in a different blog post, too.
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