Belief, Kai!

Eric Schwitzgebel has a draft entry on “Belief” for the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

One of his examples starts like this:

When someone learns a particular fact, for example, when Kai learns that many astronomers no longer classify Pluto as a planet, he or she acquires a new belief — in this case, Kai acquires the belief that many astronomers no longer classify Pluto as a planet.

I assume that people called John or Mary are desensitized to having their names used in examples by linguists and philosophers. But as the proud bearer of a rather rare name, this is a disconcerting experience. When I saw Quine’s example “Tai always eats with chopsticks” (1966, Elementary Logic (Revised Edition), §37, pp. 90-92), that already came close to home. Then, Uli Sauerland started using the name of his son, which happens to be Kai, in his examples, as in “Kai had peas or broccoli last night” (Scalar Implicatures in Complex Sentences). Now this. I can’t help but feel that these people are talking about me. Very strange.

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