PeteJ wrote: ↑Mon Aug 05, 2019 12:50 pm
I'm very late to the party but interested in the OP. I don't see the problem.
Nobody would argue...
Jane is yellow
Brian is yellow
Ergo Jane is Brian.
The point is that you don't get a choice in the matter. If you subscribe to classical logic, then the law of transitivity dictates that if A = B, and B = C, then A = C.
PeteJ wrote: ↑Mon Aug 05, 2019 12:50 pm
I expect I'm missing something,
It boils down to this question: "How do you formalize the verb
is?" in the sentence . "Jane is yellow" ?
However you choose to formalize it, do you use that semantic consistently throughout your argument?
Because if you don't - that's the definition of equivocation.
Here is one way to formalize "Jane is yellow"
f(Jane) = Yellow
Then it follows that "Brian is yellow" is: f(Brian) = Yellow
So then... f(Jane) = f(Brian). Which would be the same thing as saying "Jane's yellowness is the same as Brian's yellowness".
Cool. We an work with that. f(x) = y is what's called a
surjective function
It maps elements in the domain [Jane, Brian, Skepdick, Whoever,.....], to the co-domain of colors [Yellow, Blue, Red, Green, .....]
So back to the beginning then: f(Jane) = Yellow is the formalization of the English sentence "Jane is yellow".
And even more abstractly "is" is formalized as: f(X) = Y is a surjective function where X is a set of people and Y a the set of colors.
Is that how you use "is" all the time, or are you equivocating?
The problem boils down to the fact that "is" is ambiguous.
In exactly the same way the "=" sign in Mathematics is ambiguous.
https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/equality
The dualism that exists between Sameness and Difference. It's very Deleuzian.