John E. Clifford, On 11/09/2012 15:30:
> And I want chopped liver? Where do our goals differ, exactly? We
> both want a language capable of being used for the full range of
> communications but which has clear unequivocal grammatical rules.
> Further, I assume you too want these rules to reflect the best
> Logical relations, for clarity and precision. When I say I want to
> know what makes a sentence true, I mean that in the general way: Fa
> is true if the referent of a is in the class assigned to F. This
> works whatever that class may be and what sorts of objects there are
> and which is labeled a. What less than this do you want or more do
> you think I want?
If logical relations are the syntactic predicate--argument and operator--variable relations, I want them. If logical relations are ones that hold between logical forms and worlds -- i.e. pertain to truth conditions, then I don't want them.
You've been wanting answers from me about truth-conditions, wanting to know what the world looks like if such and such a sentence is true. The formally designed & codified part of the language I want to build doesn't answer those questions.
This difference between my goals and some of my collaborators' doesn't prevent collaboration where our goals align. But I do hope that recognition of the difference will soon quell discussion generated by differences between our goals.
--And.