From jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:46:39 2010 From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU Subject: Re: On {lo} and existence Date: Sun Mar 26 14:42:39 1995 Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Sun Mar 26 14:42:39 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Message-ID: And: > In this world there is a state of affairs in which something is blue. > But there are languages with no word for "blue". These two facts are > entirely compatible. Are you saying that there are languages where you cannot explain what "something is blue" means in English? I very much doubt it. At worst, you could always coin a new word for it and teach it by pointing at things, but I'm sure you could explain it within the language too. What I'm saying is that there is nothing intrinsic about things being blue, and especially with this example, which is so dependant on human physiology. The predicate blue() is a convenient convention of the language, to classify together a bunch of things that we perceive to have something in common, but quite arbitrary and so whatever proposition uses that predicate must be an artifice of the language, not something independent of it. > I agree that if nothing in this world was blue, > or perceivable as blue, then we would not expect any language to have > a word for blue, and the concept of blue would exist in no minds in > this world. But we could still say that the predicate blue would exist > but be unknown to any mind. You mean like the predicate qwepoi() exists but is unknown to any mind? So that for every da, we have no idea what qwepoi(da) means, and therefore much less whether it is true or not. I don't really see the point of postulating propositions that are not accesible through the language. At least angels have some charm to them, but propositions? > > What I understand you to be saying is that at least some predicates must > > somehow be there independently of the world and the speakers. > I am saying this. I don't really see why it matters. It matters because without such predicates, all predicates are a convention of the language, and so in fact their meaning is purely context dependent. When we say {ta blanu}, the only reason it may be true is that speakers agree that it is true, and not because of any intrinsic property of the world. (The reason that speakers agree has to do with similarities and patterns that they perceive in the world, but not because there is any intrinsic blueness to ta other than the one we ascribe to it through the use of language.) In such case, your "inspecting the world to ascertain the truth value of a proposition", really should be replaced by "holding a speaker convention to decide on the truth value". We can get away with the "inspecting the world" fiction because we are pretty similarly working machines, and so we can be fairly sure that a one speaker convention will conclude the same as most other speakers. > One can equally well think of propositions not as "arising", but as > already existing - as an infinite set of states-of-affairs. When a > speaker "creates" a new predicate or proposition, this involves picking > one of those already existing propositions of the shelf. Wait a second. Creating a new predicate is different from creating a new proposition. Given a set of predicates, all propositions can be generated by the grammar. The language consists of the predicates (conventional, as I see it) and the grammar rules. If you create a new predicate, you are modifying the language, and you at least need other speakers to agree with you on its meaning for it to be considered a part of the language. > It seems to me that we are using "world" in two different senses, one > defined by reality, and one by reference. Each sense is valid; we must > simply distinguish them. Agreed. The one defined by reference is the one relevant for quantification purposes. The claim {da zo'u ...} means "there is some x in the reference world, such that...". We can say about things in that reference world that they are real or non-real, certainly. Why that predicate should have any special significance in discussing grammar, I don't know. > Is grammar involved in these issues? Weren't we discussing grammar? The initial point was that the existence related to {lo} is referential, not real. Which referents belong to the real world and which don't is not very relevant in understanding {lo}, that's all. > To test whether the proposition expressed by {le prenu cu blanu} is > true of this world, find the referent of {le prenu}. find the set > of blue things, and see if that latter contains the former. Right. But how do you find the set of blue things? It's the subset that speakers conventionally select from the set of all possible referents to satisfy the predicate blue(). Or is it something more intrinsic? > To test > whether the prop expressed by {da blanu} is true of this world, find > the set of blue things, and see if it's non-empty. What's the problem? None, as long as you agree that that set is a convention of the language, and not something that exists independently. In another language you may need more than one simple predicate to refer to the same set, and more likely you would refer to a very similar but not quite the same set. (Probably two speakers of the same language would do the same.) > > Whatever, but before you evaluate a truth-condition, you need to understand > > the meaning of the predicate. In natlangs, this meaning is almost always > > context-sensitive. > I don't understand "the meaning of the predicate" - the meanings of some > words are predicates. Change to "understand the predicate" if you like. In other words, know which referents satisfy it and which don't, or rather, know what it means for a referent to satisfy it. > Are you saying that some words vary in what their > sense is, depending on the context of the utterance? I prefer to limit myself to commenting on "predicate words" rather than words in general. The case of cmavo is more complicated. I am saying that the meaning of selbri (or their sense, if you like) is context dependent. > I tend not to agree > with that, but anyway it's not relevant to truth-conditionality, which > pertains to the relationship between a meaning and a world, not to > the relationship between a word and its meaning. [There are no typos > in the "world"s and "word"s in this para.] Talking about truth-conditionality is only an easy way of saying that we are in a position to understand what it means that a proposition is true or false. The actual determination of the truth value is not that important here. What we want is to understand what an utterance means, once we do that, we can worry about whether it is true or not. Perhaps we are focusing on different stages of the process of communication. I hold that the part that goes from the words to the meaning depends on the conventional meanings we assign to predicates, and that there is nothing there to be mapped onto from the words before we agree on this convention. This is the crucial part in understanding an utterance. We may or may not be able to evaluate its truth value, but we are then able to know what each possible result of such an evaluation would tell us. Jorge