Odd. Never heard of that. Innocent me... — Baden

Neither had I, regarding the "devils triangle" thing. I heard of it when it was reported that the Wikipedia disambiguation page for this unusual phrase had been recently edited in order to make the definition match Kavanaugh's testimony. The source of the edit was traced to a Congressional IP. So, it looks like a Republican staffer Googled the phrase "devil's triangle", was directed to the Wikipedia page, saw that it referred to a sexual act involving two men and a woman, though this was rather inconvenient for Kavanaugh, and edited it to make it refer to a drinking game instead.

Something I've noticed, which may not be very significant but nevertheless is interesting: When asked about the "devil's triangle" mentioned in his calendar, Kavanaugh testified that it's a reference to a drinking quarter game. But Wikipedia and the Urban Dictionary say that it's a threesome involving two men and a woman (also, an obscure board game, and a synonym for the Bermuda Triangle). There appears to be zero Google hits for "devil's triangle" being used to refer to a drinking game and that don't relate to Kavanaugh's testimony. Of course it's entirely possible that it was a local and temporary idiom.

Also related to high-school slang: one Senator asked Kavanaugh about the "Renate Alumni" reference in his yearbook. The Senator was inquiring about the meaning of the expression. Kavanaugh already had apologized to the woman about that. But now he was implying the expression didn't even mean anything of a sexual nature and he was scolding the Senator, disingenuously suggesting that the Senator himself was trying to sully the woman's reputation rather than prompt Kavanaugh to acknowledge (as he had already done when he apologized to her!) that his bragging was rather offensive.

Here is the exchange that I mentioned above, between Grassley and Feinstein (and later, Cornyn) regarding the leaks and the Republican conspiracy theory regarding those leaks. This part of the hearings is now up on the CNN YouTube channel.

These are not incompatible beliefs based on 36 year old memories from teenage years.
which after all this testimony is really all we still have. — Rank Amateur

I think Ford might agree with you but Kavanaugh wouldn't. It's conceivable that things happened roughly as Ford remembers them and Kavanaugh was too drunk to remember any of it. It's also conceivable that something happened to Ford, in a party where Judge and Kavanaugh were present, which she now misremembers in some fashion. However, Kavanaugh isn't allowing either one of those two possibilities. He is rather arguing that, whatever happened to Ford, he couldn't possibly have been present to the party she is remembering (or misremembering). This is why his take on the events require more of a conspiratorial mindset to make sense of in light of both of their admittedly imperfect memories.

Looks like a pointed rebuke of Graham's hyperbolic and unjustified rant. And an indication he's going to go "no". — Baden

It could be read both ways. He may be signaling to Kavanaugh that his forthcoming "no" vote is a prudent statement of uncertainty rather than an indictment of him; or signaling to Ford that his forthcoming "yes" vote doesn't entail that he categorically takes Kavanaugh's word over her's either. He may also still be undecided.

That's the Republican spin, but Feinstein was directed by Ford not to release the information and there's no evidence she did. Also, according to Ford, her friends knew about it and word could have got out to the media from there. She had a journalist come snooping around her house just before she went public. We don't know. — Baden

Yes. Grassley was attempting to corner Feinstein, asking her how it might be possible that the press got a hold of the confidential letter if Feinstein or her staff didn't leak it, and if Ford merely talked to close friends about the allegations. But Feinstein told Grassley that the letter itself never was leaked, to her knowledge, and only some of the things Ford confided to her friends did. Thereafter, Ford began being hounded by the press. This is when Grassley fell silent. The Republican strategy to blame the Demograts and pretend not to be hostile to Ford at all was misfiring.

(On edit: Both Grassley and Cornyn were involved in this exchange)

Over the last few hours the Republican Senators have been hammering the point that the Democrats who call for an FBI investigation are dishonest and hypocritical since they ought to have called for an investigation as soon as Ford brought her allegations to Sen Feinstein. But then Sen Blumenthal referred to Kavanaugh's complaint that the whole thing is a conspiracy engineered by the Democrats; isn't he thus implying that Ford's allegations are politically motivated? Kavanaugh replied that he isn't blaming her but rather blaming the Democrats who violated her request for confidentiality. So, it appears that Sen Feinstein, and whoever else she shared Ford's allegations with, behaved unconscionably when they *did* respect their pledge of confidentiality and also when they *didn't* keep the allegations confidential anymore after Ford herself came out following the leaks.

On edit: And then, minutes ago, there was an interesting exchange between Feinstein and Grassley where Grassley revealed that he was quite confused regarding the nature of the leaks. He got caught into the contradictions of his theory and fell silent. The Republican conspiracy theory seems to be falling appart, under close scrutiny, but I don't think this is going to have much of an impact on the outcome of those messy public hearings. There is presently a huge rally for Kavanaugh's side on the Predictic prediction market.

A question of tactics then? I dunno, I think the corruption is too deep-set; I'm not convinced tinkering is the right way to go. We've had literal centuries of that. — StreetlightX

I'm doing what I can to separate the wheat from the shaff. @Aaron R attempted this also in a thread on scholasticism a little while ago. Any kind of a "return" to Aristotle, to Kant, to Frege, to Sellars, or to anyone else, must be done with discernement, of course. But it's not just a question of tactics. @Christoffer offered a defense of hard determinism above. While it concludes that free will is an illusion and that determinism is true, his post can be glossed, it seems to me, as an argument that the Sellarsian 'manifest image' is false while the 'scientific image' is true.

I don't think most contemporary compatibilist attempts to reconcile the two images are successful, but I agree with you that the main impediment to the attempted reconciliation is a thin disembodied conception of the self. Maybe some elements of this thin conception already were inchoate in Aristotle and other pre-modern religious thinkers, as you argue. But they have been greatly buttressed and entrenched into contemporary scientifically informed thinking as a result a the movement away from Aristotle, and from scholasticism, which has been in part propelled by the rise of the mechanistic conception of the natural world. In a way, as a result of this, the wheat has been buried under the shaff.

The only way forward is out, to reject even the terms of the debate, let alone the answers to it. — StreetlightX

I agree that the thinness of the disembodied subject, or of the rational soul, is a big part of the problem. On the Aristotelian conception of agency, the subject-agent is a rational animal, essentially embodied and encultured. Since the thorny questions of rational, moral and political autonomy, determinism and responsibility, can be discussed in the context where the thickness of the subject is acknowledged, I don't think those discussions are fruitless. Also, one must grant to the proponent of a crude scientism (e.g. Cartesian materialist), or of a naïve Cartesian dualism, some of her terms if only to be able to draw out the problems inherent to her view and then propose better terms, or better uses of those terms. (Oftentimes, it seems to me, it's not the terms themselves that are at fault but rather semi-technical uses made of them that import philosophical prejudice into the discourse and obscures the nuances of their ordinary usages).

Cool. Yeah, people who haven't looked into the history of 'free will' - i.e almost everyone - don't tend to realize what a limited, historically shallow, and conceptually empty idea it is. It was essentially a device for self-loathing Christians to address the problem of evil and subject human beings to the masochism of its sister-concept, God's grace. Its theological fetters have largely fallen away, and now the idea is rootless and even more nonsensical than ever. — StreetlightX

Old bad ideas die off and newer equally bad ideas take hold. What is becoming fashionable nowadays is to claim that autonomous rational agency and responsibility (either personal or collective, moral or political) are illusions that are being dispelled by cognitive sciences and that unconscious neurophysiological processes are the genuine sources of our choices and actions. It is being alleged that we don't know what our motives are and only science will enlighten us on the best way to pull our own strings. That seems to me more incoherent, and possibly more dangerous, than the rather innocuous religious accounts and myths that rather clumsily attempt to explain how or why animals such as us can be rationally and morally autonomous.

Science's mechanical view of nature is what has been at issue. Freewill just becomes the most convincing argument against the modern understanding of the mind being a product of machine-like information processes. — apokrisis

Yes, I think the third-rate literature that @StreetlightX deplores, because of the confused ways in which it problematizes 'the freedom of the will', can be viewed as a reductio of the attempt to account for agency and practical knowledge from a third-personal disengaged view on the material process of decision making. If agency rather is viewed as a natural (and social) phenomenon that can only be disclosed as intelligible from an empathetic and engaged participatory perspective, then there is nothing problematic in asserting that the will is a power that is being freely exercised by mature and responsible fellow rational agents.

I don't doubt this, but I think a good first step is in putting to question the very vocabulary involved;: freedom, but no 'will' please. This I think would have at least a primarily disorienting effect, which, given just how entrenched the idea is, would have value in itself. — StreetlightX

I find it useful to speak of the will and of the intellect as distinct faculties albeit ones that a rational animal can only possess conjointly. Those faculties are sets of powers, to decide what to do (and do it), in one case, and to judge how things are, in the other case. It's useful for engaging with Aristotelian and Kantian scholarship about theoretical and practical reasoning. My own view on "the will" is a mishmash of Kantian and Aristotelian notions(*), so I'm using the word "will" to distinguish the power (the will, proper) from its acts or exercises (acts of the will). Acts of the will are paradigmatically intentional actions and, at the same time, expressions of practical knowledge. However, bits of practical knowledge can remain unexpressed, when the time to act hasn't come. In that case, an act of the will can take the form of an (as of yet) unrealized intention.

(*) It owes much to Anscombe and Wittgenstein too.

Yeah, I'm aware of those moves, but I'm still of the mind that 'free will' has been so compromised by hundreds of years of theological poison that it needs to be dropped altogether. It's not 'freedom' I have a problem with, so much as 'the will'. It's that connection - unnecessary, overdetermined and intellectually disabling - that is what needs to be broken forever. — StreetlightX

My main point was that the original sin that you ascribe to theology has been co-opted by modern (late-seventeenth to eighteenth century) metaphysics and the modern scientific conception of the natural world that co-evolved with this metaphysical shift. So, merely scrubbing dubious notions (such as the purely mental acts of 'volitions') because they are tainted by their theological origins will leave the roots that currently nourish the philosophical confusions on the topics surrounding rational agency and personal responsibility firmly in place.

Why yes I am aware of the prevalence of third-rate scholarship on the issue, cited frequently by philosophical dilettantes happy to anarchonisticly and omnivorously assimilate all discussions of freedom into the two-bit reductivism of 'free will'. — StreetlightX

Alas, the Augustinian predicament doesn't merely afflict significant parts of the philosophical scholarship about the conundra of freedom, determinism and responsibility. Many of the same issues that arise from problematizing the relations of the spirit to the flesh also arise from problematizing the relations of the mind to the material body. This is of course prevalent in the social and cognitive sciences. The latter issues stem from the modern shift from a metaphysics of natural substances, their powers, and the natural (and/or social-conventional) circumstances of exercise of those powers, to a metaphysics of universal laws and the events that are subsumed under those laws. Fortunately, some of the scholarship about the topics surrounding "free will" aren't beholden to the later reductionist view. They are rather committed to explaining how the alleged problems in accounting for agency and responsibility in a natural world tend to dissolve when our attempts at naturalizing those familiar phenomena appeal to rather more relaxed (embodied and situated) Aristotelian conceptions of nature, life, rational agency and causation.

I agree. To the people who promote free will, I would keep asking 'Why?' like my determined 2-year-old does. I think they would quickly determine that behind every will, there was a preceding way... — CasKev

Answers to stubborn "why?" questions need not lead to a regress when the events at issues are acts of the will or of the intellect such as the intentional actions or beliefs of a rational agent. When you ask someone why it is that she believes something to be true, she can give you her reasons for believing it. Those reasons may appeal to empirical facts. You may then ask why those empirical facts obtain, or how did it come about that she has the capacity to know them. But those followup "why?" question then would have shifted to a different topic and hence wouldn't lead to a troublesome regress. It would simply point back to to questioner's inexhaustible curiosity (or obnoxiousness).

And likewise in the case of actions: the agent may provide the reasons why she thought her action to be the right thing to do. She needs not be thereby straddled with the burden of explaining what justifies the premises which those reasons rest upon (or explain why the circumstances obtained in which this was the right thing to do). The burden may rather shift to the enquirer to explain why, according to her, the proposed reasons might be bad.

Trump just tweeted: "The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Acquisitions the likes of which have never been seen before!"

Is an "Acquisition" somewhat of a cross between an inquisition and an accusation?

On edit: He now has deleted the tweet and reposted a corrected version.

Speculation is like creative writing. We are only limited by our imagination. — Hanover

You have moved the goalpost quite a bit, from arguing that Ford's allegations are implausible to arguing that it is possible that they are untrue. But I was merely countering your argument that they are implausible, which was grounded in part on the unjustified premise that the party was "filled with people".

So, could there have been a woman silently almost raped in the midst of a party filled with people, with the only witnesses being extremely loyal to the rapist and refusing to turn him in? — Hanover

There were only five people attending this party according to Ford. There was only one witness, Mark Judge, in the room where the incident allegedly occurred. It's possible Judge was also inebriated and didn't (or would rather not) make a big deal out of the incident. If neither Judge, Kavanaugh or Ford told what happened to the other two people who weren't in the room, then Judge remains the only potential witness. That neither Ford or Judge (let alone Kavanaugh) would have told anyone is nothing out of the ordinary.

In the wake of the new allegations, the shares for the question "Will Brett Kavanaugh be the next confirmed Supreme Court justice?" at the Predictit prediction market dropped from about 65 cents to about 35 cents. This translates into a probability of about 35% from the standpoint of the collective judgement of people who wage money on that sort of things.

But to your point, suffering a sexual assault is worse than suffering an accusation of sexual assault. I would be considerably angrier at someone who sexually assaulted my daughter than someone who falsely accused my son of sexual assault. — Baden

I think @Hanover's argument appears to derive some of its force from the considerations @Bitter Crank brought up regarding the societal consequences from having been convicted of sexual assault. But this is a consideration that ought to justify law reforms such that penalties aren't disproportionate to the crime, on the one hand, while the standard of proof remains that of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, on the other hand. As a result of such a system's fairness, women will regrettably continue to have the worse of it, in one respect, since the crimes at issue will remain difficult to prove and hence many perpetrators will continue to evade condemnation. This is a regrettable consequence that would need to be remedied by means other than law. But it's precisely because of this unavoidable imbalance that being falsely accused will be less consequential than being a victim of sexual assault. So long as the standard of proof remains suitably high, such that innocents will not be scapegoated, falsely accused individuals will seldom be condemned.

She says it happened and he says it didn't. They both have plenty of motivation to lie. — Hanover

The potential political motivations that Ford and Kavanaugh may have aren't the only ones that must be alluded to in order to make sense of their claims. While it is understandable why he could be lying, in case where the alleged incident took place, the converse scenario would require for a much more elaborate scheme for making sense of Ford's motivations. We would need to make sense of her motivation for having privately told of a made up incident to her therapist several years ago. Also, she only came out about the allegation following intense pressure as a result of the leaking of her story, and of her identity, which you conceivably can blame on the Democrats for, but not her.

Yes, in this case. But charges were not pressed and the statute of limitation on this event has expired — Bitter Crank

It's been reported that the State of Maryland doesn't have a statute of limitations for the crimes of rape and assault.

This was my point for the whole post. I am deeply sympathetic for people who have been sexually assaulted. It is her and her lawyers job to prove that she was assaulted in this way. They have no evidence whatsoever. — Questionall

This comment seems misguided in two respects. First, there is the issue of the standard of evidence. That the accused must be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt is a standard that applies to criminal proceedings. It doesn't apply to Senate investigations, which are not criminal proceedings. The President as well as most GOP Senators are opposed to there being a criminal investigation, although I hear that there isn't a statute of limitations for this sort of crime in the relevant jurisdiction, so that it would still be possible for Mrs Ford to file a complaint with local authorities.

Secondly, even in the case where there is a criminal prosecution, the burden of proof doesn't belong to the victim of the alleged crime, or to her lawyers. In fact, most victims of crimes such as rape, robbery or murder don't have any need to hire a lawyer at all. They simply file a complaint (unless they've been murdered, of course). It is rather the law enforcement authorities who are tasked with investigating and, if they find sufficient ground, recommend the case to the prosecutor. If the prosecutor takes up the case, and files charges, they then have the burden of proving that the accused is guilty as charged. The victim may be called as a witness but doesn't personally have any kind of a burden of proof. Victims of crimes don't generally have the means, let alone the duty, to conduct a proper investigation.

It would go a long way towards making such discussions more worthwhile if participants were at least somewhat aware of the history of the subject; its relation to freedom, voluntary action, agency, autonomy, responsibility, control, determination; the role it plays in law, ethics, psychology, sociology. There is, of course, massive literature on free will in philosophy, including experimental philosophy (yes, that's a thing). — SophistiCat

:up:

@Ryan B Your discussion appears premised on the assumption that belief in the existence of free will precludes belief in determinism. However, among the several possible philosophical stances on the problem of free will, determinism and responsibility; compatibilism appears to be the most popular. See the question "Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?" in this PhilPapers survey. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will and determinism are compatible.

Of course, some philosophers (and many scientists) are hard-determinists who believe that determinism precludes free will, that the laws of nature are broadly deterministic (while quantum indeterminacies are deemed by them to be irrelevant to issue of free will), and therefore that free will is a illusion. And other philosophers are libertarians who also believe that free will is incompatible with determinism, that we have free will, and that, therefore, determinism is false.

But even among contemporary libertarians, few of them believe that mind/body interactionist-dualism is required in order to account for the possibility of free will. They rather endorse some forms of monist naturalistic accounts of emergence or downward-causation. Just like the compatibilists, those libertarians are focused on describing how mind and body are related as different features of the physical world, characterizing different levels of analysis or organisation of living rational animals, rather than conceiving of mind and body as separate substances in traditional Cartesian fashion.

I wrote Plantiga to that effect, but he declined to respond. — Dfpolis

Maybe Pantinga didn't reply to you at the actual world but I'm fairly sure he did at some other possible worlds.

It's not to provide a blueprint for use at all! — Snakes Alive

I agree. Which is why I said: "...It's rather to foster understanding..."

That a theory is bound to be incomplete is not an injunction against theorizing. That is a very silly thing to think. — Snakes Alive

Of course. I quite agree. The purpose of theorizing isn't to provide a blueprint for perfect use. It's rather to foster understanding. Hence, that theories about language use are bound to be incomplete means no more and no less than that our self-understanding, qua language users, is bound to be imperfect.

And a conjecture: given any group of rules for successfully using proper names, it is possible to find an instance of successfully use that is not accounted for by that set of rules. — Banno

I don't have the slightest doubt that this conjecture is true.

And there is a way of speaking that is not given in a grammar, but shown in conversation.

And there is a way of referring that is not given by definite descriptions or rigid designation; but is shown in what we do with words. — Banno

In all of those cases what is shown and what is said is the very same thing: the very same rules. When Wittgenstein commented in PI that 'there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.' he didn't mean to refer to two different sorts of rules, I don't think, but rather to two different ways of grasping them, where the second one is primary in the sense that it is regress stopping. If there weren't a way to grasp a rule that doesn't rest on an ability to understand a linguistic expression of that rule, then there would be no way of learning the rules of language. But the fact that there is a way to learn those rules through being initiated (or trained) into the practice without the need of explicit instructions doesn't entail that one thereby is learning ineffable rules.

It's simply that children are able to use proper names without the advantage of being able to articulate a satisfactory explanation.

How can that be? — Banno

Some people can also play the piano "by ear" without being able to say anything about the rules of harmony. I am also reminded of Antonio de Nebrija, who authored and dedicated the first grammar of the Spanish language to Queen Isabella of Spain. She told him: "Why would I want a work like this? I already know the language."

Why should all reference have only one explanation? — Banno

Indeed. There is a reason why Evans's posthumously published masterpiece was titled The Varieties of Reference.

Presumably, what you say when you say that you love Shakespeare, is that you love Shakespeare. This is the most obvious and best hypothesis; why you find the alternative, that when you say you love Shakespeare you say that you love someone other than Shakespeare, is a bit mystifying. — Snakes Alive

I think you should allow that, in this imagined case, the conventional reference of "Shakespeare" might be construed to have shifted rather in the way the reference of "Madagascar" allegedly historically has shifted as a result of a widespread false belief. People who nowadays use "Madagascar" to refer to the island of Madagascar aren't thereby unwittingly making reference to something that isn't Madagascar just because "Madagascar" might have originally been used to name part of the African mainland; and something similar might be said about a shift in the use of "Shakespeare". None of this threatens in any way the thesis that proper names are rigid designators. The rigidity at issue is a rigidity across modal contexts, of course, and not a rigidity of conventional reference over time.

What about the real life version of this? Substitute Shakespeare for Godel and Francis Bacon for Schmidt. WHat do I mean when I say I love Shakespeare. Do I mean I love whoever wrote the plays attributed to S? — andrewk

This is tricky. (We are to assume that Francis Bacon is the author the plays being widely attributed to Shakespeare, right?) Your intention clearly is to convey your love for the plays being attributed to Shakespeare. Since you don't know that Shakespeare isn't the author of those plays, and you don't know that Bacon is, then you are making use of your false belief that Shakespeare wrote them in order to make reference to those plays. Thereby, what you are saying clearly presupposes the truth of this belief. It's unclear whether or not you actually said (regardless of your intention) that the plays that you love are those that have been authored by Shakespeare. But this sort of indeterminacy regarding the content of what you actually said stems from the abnormality of the situation, which messes up the conventional reference of "Shakespeare". See my discussion of Homer, above, for a related issue.

Maybe there were two Homers. Are we referring to the one who wrote the poem or the imposter who pretended? — Michael

This is a case similar to the case of Madagascar discussed by Gareth Evans. It makes trouble for Kripke's possibly excessively 'inflexible' causal theory of the reference of proper names, albeit not for his thesis that proper names function as rigid designators. If someone other than Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey, then it's possible that the meaning of "Homer" has shifted over time from its function to refer to the impostor to a new function to refer to whoever actually wrote the poems. That is, there might have been a time when the sentence "Homer wrote the Iliad and Odyssey" was conveying a false information about the individual then known as "Homer", who wrongly claimed credit for the work. And then, over time, the "Homer" naming practice that was being used to refer to this impostor completely died off, and hence room has been made for a new practice to emerge whereby "Homer" came to refer, albeit still rigidly, to whoever actually wrote the poems.

And if I don’t or can’t do this? Perhaps it’s a historical figure who is only known for being the author of this book? — Michael

There is a special convention in the case of names of famous people or historical figures where public uses of their names can be assumed to uniquely refer to them just by dint of them being generally known. In that case, all that's required, in case you don't know who that is, is to ask around, or look it up into encyclopedias or proper name dictionaries. When someone is being asked who did something and replies that NN did it, and doesn't volunteer any further information about NN, then there might be a presumption that NN is a famous individual or, at any rate, someone who she expect the inquirer to already know.

How do your intentions fix the referants of the words I use, especially when I don’t know your intentions? — Michael

If you don't know how someone who uses a word intends to be using it, then you don't know what is being said by her. If someone tells you "Steve is the author of that book", it is reasonable to assume that she means to be using "Steve" as a proper name and that she knows who Steve is. (Or else, she might say that it is some guy named Steve but she doesn't know who that is.) If you further ask who Steve is, you expect that she will be able to point out to one specific "Steve" naming practice that distinguishes it from other "Steve" naming practices. For instance, she might say that Steve is her former roommate, and not her brother, say, who also happens to be named Steve.

In fact, if you wouldn't ask her the followup question, then you wouldn't be in a position to repeat to someone else that Steve is the author of the book. The best you could do is to say that the author of the book is someone named Steve, you know not who.

It is. You know it’s Adam but think wrongly that his pen name is Steve (just as “Mark Twain” was a pen name). Someone else thinks that it’s the author’s brother Steve. A third person thinks that it’s some unrelated Steve. You all say to me “Steve is the author”. When I repeat this to someone else, who am I referring to? — Michael

When you are repeating to someone else that the author of the book is Steve, you are intending to use "Steve" in the same way in which whoever informed you of the author's identity (though naming him, in this case) used the name "Steve". If several persons who purportedly provided you with that information were using the name "Steve" differently (e.g. to refer to different 'Steve's), or mistakenly (e.g. to refer to someone not actually named Steve), then it may be the case that there now is a failure of reference when you are using this name. But this has little bearing on what it is that normally determines the reference of proper names when everyone who is party to the conversation intends to use proper names as rigid designators (as people normally do), and nobody is confused or mistaken.

I wonder, is there a difference between "my friend's father authored the incompleteness theorems" and "the author of the incompleteness theorems is my friend's father"? — Michael

Yes, there is a difference because the second sentence harbors a potential ambiguity. In some communicative contexts, it could be meant to refer, as a definite description, to whoever is the author of those theorems, or, in other communicative contexts, if could be meant to refer to the man, Gödel, who is widely credited with this authorship, rightly or wrongly. (For instance, the second sentence might be used by someone who knows who Kurt Gödel is but who temporarily forgot his name).

I think this is an ambiguous description. By it do you mean that Sue believes that her friend's father is named "Kurt Gödel" or that her friend's father authored the incompleteness theorems? — Michael

You're right. I mean that she knows that there is a famous mathematician named Kurt Gödel who wrote some famous theorems about incompleteness, or whatever, and she doesn't know that this guy is dead.