[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
At 03:29 AM 12/28/02 +1100, Nick Nicholas wrote:
> Message: 7
> Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2002 18:48:26 -0000
> From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@hidden.email>
> Subject: propositionalism redux
> 3. Depicting (e.g. "This depicts a snake"). As Nick suggests,
> we can treat this as "There is something that in some world
> (not necessarily the local world) is a snake and that in the
> local world this depicts".
Of course (weaseling), depiction need not be intended as depiction of
any one individual anyway, real or imaginary. It can be just a
construct based on the prototoype...
> There was already a need for a way to do this in Lojban,
> so that we could talk about imaginaries such as Sherlock Holmes
> without having to abandon the distinction between the local world
> and worlds that from the perspective of the local world are
> fictional. The two ways that have been proposed for doing this
> are {da'i} and {ka'e}/{nu'o}. Both are unsatisfactory for two
> reasons. The first reason is that they mean, or should mean,
> something else. {ka'e}/{nu'o} pertain to Possible Worlds.
How is this a problem? Because fictional worlds are not the same thing
as possible worlds?
> {da'i}
> is in UI and therefore has something to do with illocutionary
> meaning.
A constraint already violated with {kau}, and indeed with several UI
before that (since UI is a dumping ground for odds and sods.) An
illegitimate objection, especially for Microsoft Lojban.
> The second reason is that they don't allow us to
> distinguish "For every x there is some world w such that in w
> x is broda" and "There is some world w and for every x that in
> w is broda". For example, "For every Danish mermaid, I will
> write a poem about her", normally wouldn't mean I will write
> an infinite number of poems, one for every imaginable Danish
> mermaid.
(a) we can easily make the second the Gricean default; (b) of course we
will need to introduce machinery for possible-world reasoning into
Lojban. Although...
> What we need is a selbri, "x is world of which y is true".
> It could be a lujvo, but I'll define a NU, {jei'u}, to do
> the job: "x1 is a world of which the abstraction is true".
.. it is only because you've been working in Academic Lojban for so
long that you can do this so blithely. And, you know the fundies see
you invent cmavo and think you're a crackpot. Try using the lujvo for a
while, as a political move; you'll make it harder for the fundies to
dismiss you. (And you know they're dismissing you.) In fact, stick
close to English for a while, and use {munje} and {vasru}. (This goes
for Jorge's loi'ei too.)
Somehow this discussion has ventured into the territory discussed in the TLI resconsideration of subjunctives, which proposed just such a predicate as And suggests
http://www.loglan.org/Articles/mia-subjunctives.htmlThis suggests that da'i can handle it, because so far as I can recall, pc and Cowan reviewed that article and opined that we had the whole thing well-covered.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org