Message-Id: <199502250317.TAA15282@netcom15.netcom.com>
X-Sender: cbogart@netcom.com
Date: Fri, 24 Feb 1995 20:05:02 -0700
From: cbogart@quetzal.com (Chris Bogart)
Subject: Re: Carterian formula (was: Gricean formula?)
X-From-Space-Date: Fri Feb 24 22:17:41 1995
X-From-Space-Address: cbogart@quetzal.com

Chris Bogart asked:
>> Can you come up with a "minimal pair" of sentences that
>> might exist in a language, differing only in their use of predicates meaning
>> "x1 has a heart" and "x1 has kidneys", *without* relying on dissection,
>> organ transplants, unusual species, etc?  How about a pair of sentences
>> using two predicates whose referent sets are guaranteed to be the same?
>> (i.e. "x1 has skin", "x1 has a skin color")

John Cowan replied:
>Sure, and so can you, but I'm not sure what point you're making. The point is
>that such pairs of sentences have the same truth conditions, but they don't
>mean the same thing, in any usual sense of "mean".

The point I'm trying to make is that if you did come up with such a minimal 
pair, you'd see that they *do* mean the same thing, in the usual sense of 
"mean".  Under what circumstances would a speaker want to say "bob 
has-a-heart", except in the situation where disection, surgery, or birth 
defects are involved? The only other circumstance I can imagine would be in 
order to indicate that Bob is a member of the subset of animals which has a 
heart; in which case "bob has-a-kidney" would be synonymous.

Part of the problem, perhaps, is that the two predicates you have chosen 
happen to have pseudo x2 places worked into the gloss -- so they look more 
different than they really are.  Can you think of a hypothetical new gismu 
for Lojban which has exactly the same referrent set as "klama" (or pick one 
you like better), but which means something different?  I can't, so I would 
conclude that JC's logic would at least apply to "klama", and by analogy to 
other gismu.  

                     ____
 Chris Bogart        \  /  ftp://ftp.csn.org/cbogart/html/homepage.html
 Quetzal Consulting   \/   cbogart@quetzal.com