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Addenda to MENTAL

creativity, counterfactuals, persuasion

When a philosopher tries to explicate a common sense notion like
"X believes Y", he is likely to come up with a single rather long
sentence whose words are to be taken in their ordinary English
meaning.  Such explicit definitions are useful when available,
but we know from science that there often isn't such a definition
corresponding to the usage of the term in a good scientific
theory.  Thus, "the internal energy of a certain mass of gas"
is meaningful only in the context of the theory.

	Philosophical logicians write as though they believed
the above but rarely seem to advance comprehensive theories.

John owes Bill a horse.
Terry thinks this involves thoughts.  In my opinion, humanity has
adopted an abstract notion of debt that doesn't necessarily
involve any human knowledge.  Thus an automatic action by
one company's machine may cause it to incur a contingent
liability that may never be known by any human because the
contingency may not occur or because the liability may be
lumped with other debts and never be considered separately.