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la Ra Pa with presupposition of uniqueness



One of the virtues of being sick as a dog is that I fall leep more often (hard for my wife to imagine!).  So, after my last round of corresponding, I dropped off.  And when I awoke (and this the virtue part), I had an entirely new perspective on &'s unique R, one not colored by memories of past "myopic singulars" but focusing on the present discussion (I think-- it gets a bit copped up sometimes).  
So, using la Ra Pa presupposes that there is exactly one R.  Under that presupposition, it says that that one R is P.  In a word, it is the Russellian definite description.  Well, not quite Russell's, but variant 2.  Since this description works only when R is unique, when R is not unique, when the presupposition fails, the sentence simply has no truth value, is neither true nor false.  This is generally a rather awkward position in logic, but it is a situation that occurs often enough in real life to have a place in language.

I do wish he didn't use l, though, since my Lojban saturated mind still sees that a {lo} or long-scope s. 

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