Palin doesn't know what the VP does.

Sarah Palin is the republican nominee for VP, but two months ago...

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I love Dennis Kucinich

I may not always agree with him, and FSM knows I'm horrified by the whole UFO thing, but I really wish that more politicians had his passion.

This is Rep. Kucinich addressing the DNC.

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Wow...

just....wow.

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Dissertation Live Blogging: Russell on Definite Descriptions

How are we to analyze the semantics of linguistic expressions like the following?

(1) The Queen of England is old.
(2) The prime minister of England is male.
(3) The present king of France is bald.

(1), (2) and (3) contain what are called definite descriptions (because they are descriptions beginning with the definite article "the"). At first blush, it seems like we might analyze them in the same way we do names. When it comes to names like "George W. Bush" or "Samuel Clemmens" we tend to think that all there is to the meaning of a name is what it refers to. "George W. Bush" picks out Dubya, so it means Dubya. That's all there is to it. And when it comes to definite descriptions, this solution seems appealing - 'the queen of England' just means Elizabeth II.

But there is a problem with this approach, one which becomes readily apparent when we examine sentence (3). The expression 'the present king of France' has no referent. There is no king of France at the moment. But, on the approach we are taking, that would mean that the expression 'the present king of France' is meaningless, and that seems wrong.

To get around this problem, Bertrand Russell suggested that the semantics of definite descriptions are quantificational. He gave the following analysis of (3) (using E and A as the existential and universal quantifiers, respectively):

(4) Ex(Px & Bx) & Ay(Py > x=y)

In plain English, (4) reads "There exists exactly one thing that is the king of France and it is bald."

Russell's solution is pretty effective at avoiding the problem we ran into earlier. Sentence (3) is meaningful even though it lacks a referent. And because it lacks a referent, it is false.

Russell's solution is not without it's problems, however. For example, what about sentence (5)?

(5) The cat is on the mat.

We'll look at why Russell's analysis can't handle (5) next time.

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McCain Wants Your Water!

McCain has said that he wants to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact to take water from the upper basin states - and that includes New Mexico - and give it to his state of Arizona. Given that the states are all working well together under the recently renegotiated compact, I've no idea why McCain would want to do this. If word gets out (which, of course, it won't, given the stupid media), this could be a huge political problem for McCain in the Southwest. One thing people who live in the desert really don't like is people taking away their water.

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McCain's Mansions

I've been finding it very difficult to understand how people could come to trust John McCain to do anything but make matters worse when it comes to our ailing (okay, let's face it, our seriously ill) economy. As a graduate student, I don't find it particularly troubling that I have to scrounge or ask Mommy and Daddy for a little help now and again. That's what graduate student life is like. But when regular Joe and his wife, who hold down decent paying jobs, suddenly can't make the bills anymore, I know that something is wrong.

Some people aren't having trouble though. John and Cindy McCain certainly aren't. And John McCain's big man on economics - Phil Graham - has made it clear that he thinks that the recession we are in at the moment is a figment of our imaginations. This is the same man, of course, who helped to drive gas prices up by creating the Enron loophole, and also was a main contributor to the mortgage business deregulation that led to the mortgage crisis. Now, I'm not saying that the Obama family is particularly hard off. They aren't. But Michelle Obama isn't a beer heiress worth upwards of 100 million dollars. And Barak Obama's top economic advisor isn't a man who thinks the American people are whiners. I simply can't understand why anyone who actually feels the pinch of high gas prices, or rising mortgage payments, or layoffs could possibly think that McCain either knows that the economy actually is in shambles or that he would give a damn if he did know. His pockets are well lined whether you can make your house payment or not. BraveNewFilms puts in into video much better than I could say it, though. Just watch:

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Go and read this...

Precisely what is wrong with this country.

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