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C00002 00002	Dear Professor Quine:
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Dear Professor Quine:

	I can't claim to have been misled by your 1947 paper.  I must
learn not to lightly ascribe views to people, even if doing so sometimes
results in a letter from someone I admire.

	On looking at my paper, I see that what appeared in {\it Daedalus}
doesn't correspond to my latest computer file on the subject.
In {\it Daedalus} it says, ``His nominalism suggests $\ldots$'' and in my
computer file it says ``Nominalism suggests $\ldots$''.  It looks
like somebody got to me about calling you a nominalist before you
did, but the correction didn't make it into the published version.

	As to ``nonmonotonic logic'', I did coin the term
``non-monotonic reasoning'' in a 1977 paper and have subsequently
gone along with omitting the dash.  I was appealing to the
existing use of the adjective ``nonmonotonic'' in mathematics.
The AI usage refers to the set of conclusions of reasoning not
being a monotonic increasing function of the set of premisses.
For this reason, I don't see that ``polytonic'' would do unless
mathematics as a whole could be persuaded to change.

	I do see a need for intensional objects, even ideas, in
languages for the use of AI programs.  I am trying to avoid
difficulties
% , DAEDAL.2[F87,JMC]/3P/42L
with defining their identity in general by introducing notions of
objects meaningful in limited context.  In this proposed theory,
contexts would be objects, and there would be a wff
$defined(idea, context)$.  Of course, I can't guarantee that this
can be made to work well enough to be useful in AI.

	I plan to be at Harvard from September until Christmas,
and if you are interested, I would very much like to discuss
these problems with you.

Sincerely,