That seems fair. What I was mostly trying to get at was a way to describe Santa without admitting his existence; for instance, I could say, “Santa wears a green coat!” and you’d be able to say, “That’s wrong!” without either of us ever claiming that Santa actually exists. In other words, we would be communicating information about N, but not S.
More generally speaking, this problem usually arises whenever a word has more than one meaning, and information about which meaning is being used when is conveyed through context. As usual, discussion of the meaning of words leaves out a lot of details about how humans actually communicate (for instance, an absolutely enormous amount of communication occurs through nonverbal channels). Overloaded words occur all the time in human communication, and Santa just happens to be one of these overloaded words; it occasionally refers to S, occasionally to N. Most of the time, you can tell which meaning is being used, but in a discussion of language, I agree I was being imprecise. The concept of overloading a word just didn’t occur to me at the time I was typing my original comment, for whatever reason.
And it is admittedly kind of funny that I can say “Superman is from Krypton, not from Vulcan!” and be understood as talking about a fictional character in a body of myth, but if I say “Superman really exists” nobody understands me the same way (though in the Superman mythos, Superman both really exists and is from Krypton). A parsing model that got that quirk right without special-case handling would really be on to something.
That seems fair. What I was mostly trying to get at was a way to describe Santa without admitting his existence; for instance, I could say, “Santa wears a green coat!” and you’d be able to say, “That’s wrong!” without either of us ever claiming that Santa actually exists. In other words, we would be communicating information about N, but not S.
More generally speaking, this problem usually arises whenever a word has more than one meaning, and information about which meaning is being used when is conveyed through context. As usual, discussion of the meaning of words leaves out a lot of details about how humans actually communicate (for instance, an absolutely enormous amount of communication occurs through nonverbal channels). Overloaded words occur all the time in human communication, and Santa just happens to be one of these overloaded words; it occasionally refers to S, occasionally to N. Most of the time, you can tell which meaning is being used, but in a discussion of language, I agree I was being imprecise. The concept of overloading a word just didn’t occur to me at the time I was typing my original comment, for whatever reason.
(nods) Yes, agreed with all of this.
And it is admittedly kind of funny that I can say “Superman is from Krypton, not from Vulcan!” and be understood as talking about a fictional character in a body of myth, but if I say “Superman really exists” nobody understands me the same way (though in the Superman mythos, Superman both really exists and is from Krypton). A parsing model that got that quirk right without special-case handling would really be on to something.
The Sense/Reference distinction handles this all out of the box, without the assumption that only certain words have double meanings.
Eg the, the correct sense of Superman is being from Krypton. But Superman has no referent...is fictional , does not exist.
It also forces you to reject objects in virtual reality as “real”.
News to me. How?