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Re: [engelang] intensions & extensions (Xorban)

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:31 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote: 

Mike S., On 14/09/2012 00:48:

> Can you show me your version of "se li mlti pxreki vska'ake" with the
> reading that it is unknown whether the picture was intended to
> represent a real or imaginary cat?

You're asking John, but I'll butt in and give my (provisional) answer:

"la mlta vska'aka"
or
"la/sa fa mlto'e vska'aka"

but not
"sa mlta vska'aka"
or
"la/sa ha mlto'e vska'aka"

Thank you.

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 9:59 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
 

Since we are just doing syntax, the main thing f does is prevent the the great intensional no-nos, quantifying out and interchange of identicals.  The indeterminate cat picture sa le fe si smi mlti pxrake, I think.  The fact that some quantifier is evaluated in another world doesn't mean that its value is not also in this one.

Thank you and yes I filled in the "vska'aka" without trouble.  I might have guessed something like that, but I wanted to be sure.  Maybe I am simply obtuse, but I thought that you might wish to know that you may be cutting your arguments off at the knees by not providing an occasional illustration of your points and ideas here and there.

I honestly think that this approach to intensions might make more sense if NU-type abstractions were actually about possible worlds, but that definitely seems not the case (either in Lojban or in Xorban).  I guess one possibility would be to explicitly assign "h-" to that function. 

si hi mlto'e se pxreki vska'ake
"some world in which something is a cat, some picture [of it] I see"
"I see a picture of a world in which something's a cat."

To be honest, while I won't say flatly that it doesn't work, it does seem to me a roundabout way of speaking.  Does it really make the most sense to talk about a possible world being depicted when what actually seems depicted is the cat from that possible world? What logical form is closest to what we want to say?