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Once again, I'm going to make a fool of myself.I mean, what I'm going to say, people here have presumably said years ago, and it's my fault for tuning out of discussion. And the discussion has also presumably moved miles ahead or away or whatever. But I'll do this anyway.
What is the difference between "I know someone killed Laura Palmer", and "I know who killed Laura Palmer"?
Well, the intuitive thing is to break the second claim down into two claims: "I know someone killed Laura Palmer" and "I know who that someone is". So we might try {mi djuno ledu'u da zo'u: da goi xy catra la lauras.palmer.} and {mi djuno ledu'u da mintu de}
But of course, that's not quite enough (as the very lame use of {de} is meant to indicate.) The 'who' has to be extensionally defined (pinpoint a particular individual), not intensionally (give a description of the individual, say a predicate they match). Otherwise you get this:
-- I know who killed Laura Palmer! -- Yeah, who? -- The same guy who killed Theresa Banks! No, that's not an answer; we want a name.I knew for a while that eggheads speak of extension and intension in terms of variable scope, and didn't quite know why. It occurred to me today. This is not news to you, but let's go:
Intension: Dale Cooper knows that, for some X, X killed Laura Palmer => Dale knows someone killed Laura Extension: For some X, Dale Cooper knows that X killed Laura Palmer => Dale knows who killed LauraThe difference? "BOB killed Laura" and "someone killed Laura" are two distinct claims; the first entails the second, of course.
Now, say Coop knows about BOB and I don't. In the intensional reading, Coop just knows that there's some blank who did it; he knows the claim with the blank in it, because the job of the prenex is to insert the blank. In the extensional. the identity of X is a blank as far as I'm concerned, but not as far as Coop's concerned. The X has already been filled in by the time we get to his knowledge. Compare:
For some X, Dale Cooper is in love with X. I don't know how that X is. But we're strongly implying Coop knows.Instantiating X -- that is, filling X in with a value --- make sense in the extensional reading and not the intensional:
Extension: For some X, Dale Cooper knows that X killed Laura Palmer => X = BOB: Cooper knows that Bob killed Laura Palmer Intension: Dale Cooper knows that, for some X, X killed Laura Palmer => Dale knows that, for some BOB, BOB killed Laura Palmer ... Bzzt.So what's {kau}? {kau} is simply an instruction that, when you embed the current bridi into someone's epistemology, you swing the prenex before the knower rather than after:
.i la deil.kuper. djuno ledu'u ma kau catra la lauras.palmer..i su'o no da zo'u: la deil.kuper. djuno ledu'u da catra la lauras.palmer.
(There's a little trick with {ma} and 0 quantification we're doing there; move along, nothing here to see.)
If {kau} has meaning, then obviously the absence of {kau} has meaning. The absence of {kau} --- which I think can legitimately be indicated with {kaunai} --- indicates that the prenex stays where the hell it is:
.i la deil.kuper. djuno ledu'u da kaunai catra la lauras.palmer..i la deil.kuper. djuno ledu'u su'o pa da zo'u: da catra la lauras.palmer.
Now, there is an intuitive sense in which {du'u ... kau} has a meaning distinct from any embedding knower. That sense is that the variable flagged is instantiated or uninstantiated. But, in this take at least, instantiation is something that you need a knower around to do. So to me
.i da kau catra la lauras. is identical to: .i su'o da zo'u: mi djuno ledu'u da catra la lauras whereas the default .i da (kaunai) catra la lauras. is identical to: .i mi djuno ledu'u su'o da zo'u: da catra la laurasThe linguists in the audience will at this point grimace at the performatives. (That's the assumption that any sentence X can be paraphrased as "I say X" or "I know X".) The performative hypothesis was big in the early '70s, and blew up spectacularly by the end of the decade. I don't remember how, which is why I'm using it. :-)
But, you might retort, then {kau} becomes meaningless outside of a knower and a predicate. Yes, and that's no big problem. In cases like this, we pull out the lambda salvator. :-) If the only real things are numbers, "+" doesn't mean anything. It needs two numbers either side of it to mean something -- a number. So + is \lx\ly.x+y. x means something; y means something; and x+y means something. But + on its own doesn't.
Same thing in Lojban ce'u. We only allow the existence of predications and entities --- bridi and sumti. So what's a quality? A quality is something that needs a referent (what will go into ce'u) to turn into a predication (du'u). We know what {le du'u mi xunre} means: it has a concrete reference to me and an attribute of me. What does redness refer to? On its own, nothing; you need to plug a referent in to evaluate it. But that's OK; sometimes pieces of language need to able to float like that. So redness is \lx.xunre(x) : leka ce'u xunre. It's not du'u, so it's not meaningful in itself. It's meaningful when it gets turned into du'u: it's du'u in waiting.
So I would claim (again, getting all '70s linguistics --- categorial grammar, if you must know), that semantically kau is a lambda expression, taking an entity, a predication containing that entity, and a knower:
kau = \lX\lY(X)\lZ."su'o no X zo'u: Z djuno ledu'u Y(X)In swinging prenexes around, {kau} obviously has scope issues. Multiple knowers do indeed lead to ambiguity:
la kup. djuno ledu'u la xaris. cusku ledu'u da kau catra la lauras. We have three possibilities: (1) Coop and Harry both know it, and Coop knows that Harry said it(2) Coop knows that Harry blurted out the name of the killer; Harry has no idea what he just said (3) Harry knows the killer. Coop is aware that Harry knows the killer. Coop doesn't know the killer himself.
(1) corresponds to:su'o da zo'u: la kup. djuno ledu'u la xaris. cusku ledu'u da catra la lauras.
So da has scope over the whole sentence (3) corresponds to:la kup. djuno ledu'u su'o da zo'u: la xaris. cusku ledu'u da catra la lauras.
So da has local scope(2) I have no idea about, and this may make the whole thing tumble; I'd rather leave it for another day.
So how to distinguish between (1) and (3)? In such ambiguities of scope, Lojban normally employs subscripts; but subscripted UI is very very bad news.
But we do have a solution that can be pressed into service: attitudinal scope. It's a hack, but I think we should be able to get away, in the long-range case, with:
la kup. bu'okau djuno ledu'u la xaris. cusku ledu'u da kau catra la lauras.
where we understand bu'okau, which would be literally meaningless, to delimit knowers. It could delimit what is known instead, but I think it would be more useful here.
In the objections:xod says I'm saying that in ma kau, ma retains its meaning, and in da kau, da retains it meaning. I don't mind saying that; and it's already known that ma kau means su'o no , not su'o pa, consistent with the behaviour of ma on its own.
xod asks what the diff is between makau and ko'a. I kind of concur with what he's hinting: other than the quantification being by default su'o no rather than su'o pa, and the fact that ko'a must be assigned (which is a *big* stumbling block), ko'a is by definition instantiated --- its prenex is way outside, same as any name's. So they're basically similar.
I am unditching djuno in the definition, which is of course not really what xod wanted.
I think this is consistent with what little CLL says on it.Jordan doesn't see what the point of the question is, and why formalise. The reason is, I have no idea what Jorge means when he uses {kau}, and that's a problem.
And now, Jorge:
{mi tolmorji le du'u makau zukte}, "I forgot who dunnit". Is that
the same as "I forgot that {someone dunnit, for a known someone}"?
I can remember that someone dunnit, for a known (to someone else)
someone, and yet forget who it was that dunnit.
So by first principles: mi ca'o djuno ledu'u su'o da zo'u: da zukte su'o da zo'u: ge da zukte gi naku mi djuno ledu'u da zukte su'o da zo'u: ge da zukte gi mi mo'u djuno ledu'u da zukte The way I've just described kau, gives you: su'o da zo'u: mi tolmorji le du'u da zukte which is not the same as mi tolmorji ledu'u su'o da zo'u: da zukte since you still remember someone did it, just not someone known.If this means I was wrong about saying "known", I retract; I hadn't thought it through. It's not just "known", it's "known to the current salient knower".
The way we sorted it out is to say that {lo'i du'u makau broda}
is the set of answers to {ma broda}. It is not absolutely clear
whether negative answers are included, that's why I'm in doubt
about the instantiation bit, but I think they are. If I know
that nobody did it, can I say "I know who did it: nobody"? I
think yes.
Obviously you have to be able to say that. (I won't get into whether answers should be propositions or entities, because you can argue for both, and I don't see that argument as pertinent here.) So, how do you say "I know that noone did it?" Let's redo the lot:
"I know someone or noone did it" .i mi djuno ledu'u su'o no da zo'u: da zukte "I know who did it (and it might have been noone)" .i su'o no da zo'u: ganai da zukte gi mi djuno ledu'u da zukte "I know noone did it" .i mi djuno ledu'u no da zo'u: da zukte And if (as I suspect) that means the same as: .i no da zo'u: mi djuno ledu'u da zukte then we're still OK. The other thing is, Jorge quite conversationally said:
i mi nitcu lo'e tanxe "I need a box." i ma skari ty "Of what colour?" i makau skari "Of any colour." "(Of whatever colour.)"
Not defending it, because he was illustrating something completely different; but as an assumed fact about the language. So while I've been away :-) , {kau} has turned from an indirect question marker to a focus marker?
A, I hate this. B, this does not follow from CLL. C, how many people are doing this?D, linguistics conflates focus and indirect questions; but I do not currently think this reflects semantics; I think this is just methodological convenience on their part, because the two do tend to be coextensive in the world's languages. And focus ain't about semantics at all, but discourse organisation --- whereas there is definitely something semantic going on with indirect questions, the whole issue of identity and instantiation. "I know who killed Laura P." does not mean the same as "I know !!!***SOMEONE***!!! killed Laura P."
E, my God do I hate this.I don't have the energy or the time for another flamefest, and there's lots of other Lojban stuff to do, and even more non-Lojban stuff. But this is the kind of thing that I regard as contrary to the intention of CLL, and I would frown on broadening the sense of {kau} in this way. Sorry, Jorge, but I do. I would relent if I knew that a significant proportion of other Lojbanists use kau in this broader meaning. And that it is being presented as a fait accompli unnerves me.
OK, back to you guys. Jorge, when you explain what you've been doing, could you please type very slowly for the jboske-impaired like myself? :-)
-- Life Dr Nick Nicholas, Dept of French & Italian Studies Is a knife University of Melbourne, Australia Whose wife nickn@hidden.email Is a scythe http://www.opoudjis.net --- Zoe Velonis, Aged 14 1/2.