[SEQ RERUN] The Quotation is not the Referent
Today’s post, The Quotation is not the Referent was originally published on 13 March 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
It’s very easy to derive extremely wrong conclusions if you don’t make a clear enough distinction between your beliefs about the world, and the world itself.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Probability is in the Mind, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
I had never read that one before. Maybe it makes more sense in the context of the full sequence?
It seemed like Eliezer was writing about content of the sort found in Naming And Necessity from the perspective of Loeb’s Theorem, except this hypothesis isn’t strong, because it implies that Eliezer would have been tilting at a straw man version of modern attempts by academic philosophers to figure out how reference works in natural language. I presume he was critiquing something or someone that was contextually salient, like someone being “wrong on the internet” at the time, but is not obvious right now to me who that might have been. The thing is, morning/evening star distinctions are a staple of the thought experiments in that area of philosophy, and I’m not aware of anyone else who uses that distinction, so I’m at a loss.
For what its worth, the people studying philosophy of language seem to me to understand the importance of keeping your language and meta-languages separate, and don’t just use quoting, but novel forms of quoting so they can distinguish between different theories about how to use language and thought to model language and thought, with things sort of similar to this:
morning star
morning star
morning star
morning star
morning star
morning star
Except, of course, XML hadn’t been invented when they started their work and a lot of their typographic conventions tend to involve weird bracket-y-looking quotes, subscripts, and prose that can be sort of hard to parse, and there are apparently legitimate arguments about how this stuff should work (which I don’t understand very well, this not being an area of personal expertise).
Finally caught up to this point in the re-posting of the sequences …
I think that Eliezer’s just pointing out the need for some kind of quoting machinery. I don’t think that he’s claiming that this would be news to philosophers of language. He just wants readers who might not be philosophers of language to recognize the need for quoting and to notice some features of how it works.
In part, he’s probably trying to instill a certain logical sophistication in his audience so that they can follow things like Löb’s theorem.