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5. See Appendix 2: the translator has actualized the complete action (and intention) of Raoul by translating "hand raised to strike." |
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6. On fictional possible worlds see Schmidt (1976: 165-73) and Ihwe (1973: 399ff.). |
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7. Philosophically speaking, a more atomistic view is even possible. But let us assume the notion of property as a primitive (thus following the current literature on possible worlds). |
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8. See the notion of 'actual' world as a relativized semantic apparatus in relation to a single user outlined by Volli (1973). See also Van Dijk (1976c: 31ff.) and his notion of S-worlds (speaker-hearer possible worlds). |
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9. According to an example of Hughes and Cresswell (1968), if we suppose that W2 contains two individuals x1 and x2 while W1 contains only x1, then W2 is 'conceivable' from W2 while the opposite is not possible: "We can conceive of a world without telephones . . . but if there had been no telephones, it might surely have been the case that in such a world no one would know what a telephone was, and so no one could conceive of a world (such as ours) in which there are telephones; i.e., the telephoneless world would be accessible to ours but ours would not be accessible to it" (p. 78). Such an approach seems to me still exaggeratedly 'psychological'even though probably proposed by its authors as a mere metaphor. |
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10. The lexical information on carriages comes from The Encyclopedia Americana, Grand Dictionnaire Universel du XIX siècle (Paris: Larousse, 1869), The Encyclopedia Britannica (1876), The Oxford English Dictionary, and Webster's Dictionary (1910). |
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11. See also the difference between Sigma and Pi properties in Groupe µ, 1970a distinction which falls under the same strictures. |
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12. One can wonder whether there is still a point of no return where a given property cannot be judged as accidental and cannot be denied. Even in a naval museum a brigantine, to be complete, should have at least potentially the property of keeping afloat. This happens since people usually consider a brigantine as a traveling device. But a scuba diver looking for submerged treasures can still consider a sunken brigantine a brigantine even though it is no longer a fully functional ship but a piece of wreckage. |
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For the director of Buchenwald, a human being had the sole necessary property of being boilable to produce soap. What we have to judge is his moral right to disregard all the other properties and to blow up this sole one; what we have to object to is the ideology governing his ethics, not his formal semantics. As Allais once said, "La logique mène à tout, à condition d'en sortir." According to his frame of reference, the director of Buchenwald was semantically correct. The political problem of the free world was only how to destroy that frame of reference and to show its ideological partiality (see Eco, 1976, 3.9). |
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13. This problem has already been debated in discussions on logical analysis of knowledge and belief (see, for instance, Hintikka, 1970). Can we say that |
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