Substitution into Intensional Contexts and Web Browsers

Jessica — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:03:00 -0400

Let the input into a web browser be A and the composite output of a web browser be B. For instance, the page source of a web page would be A, while the page as the user experiences it would be B.

Consider then the following proposition:

Louis believes that man is Clark Kent.

Since we can substitute “that man” with “Superman” using Prototype’s gsub function,

According to A, Louis believes that man is Clark Kent.

<body>
<ol>
  <li>
    <span id="test2">
      Louis believes that man is Clark Kent.
    </span>
  </li>
</ol>
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="trixie.js" >
</script>
</body>
</html>

However, according to B, Louis believes Superman is Clark Kent, which we know from our comic book reading is not true. Uh oh!

Since search engines index A and not B, any substitutions made on the client side may not be captured by a search engine. In other words, it is possible that a site may report that “Louis believes Superman is Clark Kent”, i.e. something false, while the search engine has captured that the site is reporting that “Louis believes that man is Clark Kent”, i.e. something that is true (or vice versa).

This is not the most interesting outcome of this thought experiment. What is interesting is that Javascript (and any similar client side technology with substitution methods similar to prototype’s gsub) gives us a way to expand the scope of the object of the proposition to include multiple intensions of a term.

a.muse: Substitution into Intensional Contexts and Web Browsers

Substitution into Intensional Contexts and Web Browsers