4 ms·
I do not follow the objection to this response (at the top of the section "Responses"): "x is grue" is not solely a predicate of x, but of x and a time t — we
by mannykannot 8y ago
I do not follow the objection to this response (at the top of the section "Responses"):
"x is grue" is not solely a predicate of x, but of x and a time t — we can know that an object is green without knowing the time t, but we cannot know that it is grue. If this is the case, we should not expect "x is grue" to remain true when the time changes. However, one might ask why "x is green" is not considered a predicate of a particular time t - the more common definition of green does not require any mention of a time t, but the definition grue does.
Surely "x is green" is not considered a predicate of a particular time t simply because it isn't, by definition, and the fact that grue and bleen are defined as such is simply being used in a faulty analogy that is beside the point?
It continues this response also begs the question because blue can be defined in terms of grue and bleen, which explicitly refer to time - but blue, so defined, loses any dependence on time even if it is nominally a parameter, and so can be used in inductive arguments with respect to time in ways that would be invalid for grue and bleen.
- BlackFly 8y agoI agree, I think grue and bleen were constructed so that green and blue could be redefined in terms of these new time dependent predicates to confuse the fact that the original colors are not time dependent. In math it is completely normal to write down some complicated formula of time dependent functions and get a result which is independent of time, otherwise there could never be energy conservation for example. There are conventional time dependent predicates like a person's name that nobody has a problem intuiting that induction fails for (many people take their spouse's name after marriage or return to their original name after divorce). It seems like these predicates were invented just to try to confuse what it means for a predicate to be time dependent.