[FRIAM] intension/extension

[thompnickson2 at gmail.com]

Jon, 

 

In my world, intenSionality arises within the frame of intenTional  utterances (or actions?) in which a state of affairs is framed within an a verb of explicit or implied mentation.  Or perhaps, when an action is directed toward a goal.  The hall mark of such intenTional utterances (or actions?) is implicative opacity:  From absolute certainty that A believes proposition [X] one can infer nothing about the truth of X or even the existence of any of the  objects that proposition [X] concerns.  Another way of putting this is that statements involving verbs of mentation are assertions about the organization of the behavior of actors, and say nothing about the world beyond that.  

 

What we were trying to do at the end of our conversation on Friday was construct some sort of a mapping from this understanding of the intention/extension distinction, rooted in ethology, and perhaps a bit of philosophy, to yours, rooted in programing, and perhaps also in another bit of philosophy.  And I thought we had a moment of sparking between those two worlds when you pointed out that some HUGE present of programming work consists in debugging, which I would consider to be removing from all the possible entailments of a statement (it’s EXtension) all those that are not within the INtention of the programmer.  

 

So, when you write a line of code such as “1. Make me a ham sandwich”, you intend the robot to assemble cheese and bread into something  you can eat, NOT to transform you into something edible.  And when the robot goes to the cupboard and gets out the butchering knives and smoking and salting tools, you realize that you need to debug the code.  

 

This is what I think you programmers ought to mean by the intension/extension distinction.  

 

What (again – forgive me – in citizen language) do you actually mean. 

 

What is (to you) the intension of that distinction?

 

NIck

 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

 

 

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Jon Zingale
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2020 11:05 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] intension/extension

 

Nick,

 

The tension in the discussion was mostly between

two subtly different words: Intentionality <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/intentionality/>  as found

in the work of Bretano and intensionality <https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-intensional/>  as found

in the work of Church. While Church did invent

the lambda calculus, the precursor to functional

languages, he himself was a logician.

 

Jon

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