[FOM] Question About Church

[Harry Deutsch]

Suppose you have a language with infinitely many primitive constants, and some mechanism whereby they acquire referents.  Is there an effective test to determine co-reference?  I guess that would depend on the mechanism.  This would be so even in the finite case.  But I'm afraid I don't understand Church's question.
On Jun 15, 2013, at 8:44 AM, Alasdair Urquhart wrote:

> With a sufficiently rich vocabulary with numerical terms,
> undecidability of coreference follows by standard methods.
> However, this seems rather easy, so perhaps I am
> misunderstanding Church's question.
> 
> On Fri, 14 Jun 2013, Harry Deutsch wrote:
> 
>> Dear Bill Greenberg, Yes.  I think my remark that the word "non-synonymous" could be omitted was false, since if 'a' and 'b' are synonymous, then a=b and we know that 'a' and 'b' are co-referential. Church's question concerns specifically concurrent names that are not synonymous. However his last sentence is: " The difficulty lies in a method by which to determine in regard to each pair of primitive constants whether they are concurrent."  Here it is "each pair of primitive constants" not just those that are not synonymous.  What is the answer to Church's "open question?"  Best, Harry On Jun 14, 2013, at
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