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Re: [engelang] intensions & extensions (Xorban)



Mike S., On 14/09/2012 03:34:
On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 8:31 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto: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?

    "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"
[...]
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."

That's the other way round from how I had h & f, because I'd thought current f *is* about possible worlds. At any rate, my proposal is to assign h to whichever isn't the current f.

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?

I'd say that what is being depicted is a possible situation, in this case, a cat-shaped possible situation. A cat is a kind of situation, a pattern of energy--matter in spacetime.

--And.