Banno wrote:
Fascinating that three words can elicit over sixty posts.

Banno wrote:

The problem is with the implicit or explicit theory that every word has a referent. It just ain't so. And this is another example from our everyday use of English that demonstrates the poverty of the referential theory of meaning.

Myself and I by John Perry wrote:

A child who
is unconcerned about and even unaware of the weather anywhere but where he is, can treat the issue of whether it is raining or not as a property of a time, rather than a relation between times and places. He says, \It is raining now" rather than \It is raining here now". (In this case the argument role is no always occupied by the same place, but always occupied by a place with a fixed relation to the agent, the place he is at.) The child we thought of above says \It is now 7 o'clock p.m.," treating being 7 o'clock p.m. as a property of the present time, rather than a relation between that time and a place or time zone. Before Einstein, we could treat simultaneity as a 2-ary relation between events, rather than as a 3-ary relation between a pair of events and an inertial frame, because in our daily life we never need to worry about alternative interial frames. In all of these cases, I say that the judgement concerns the xed, unarticulated object, even thought it is not explicilty about it. (See [5]). The judgement concerns the object because its truth-value of the depends on the object, even when it is not explicitly represented in thought. The child's is right when he thinks \It is 7 o'clock" because it is 7 o'clock Pacic Coast Time; he is right when he judges \It is raining now," if it is raining where he is.