Message-Id: <m0rkgDv-00007MC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Fri, 3 Mar 1995 17:18:28 EST
Reply-To:     jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@FINHUTC.hut.fi>
From:         jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Subject:      Re: On {lo} and existence
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 6625
Lines: 141

And:
>  There is no proposition such that only one
> utterance maps to it. To prove that, just find the sentence uttered,
> and utter it again.

Many sentences will change meaning when uttered for a second time.
I would even say that every sentence will have a different meaning
each time that it is uttered, but probably you kick that difference
out to pragmatics.

> I don't see how different utterances of {da de zehe gerku} correspond
> to different propositions. I am talking about propositions derivable
> by grammatical rule, not by ad hoc inference.

Yes, I think that is where I misunderstood. I meant that either each
utterance maps to a (sometimes only very slightly) different proposition,
or propositions are not all that there is to language. I suppose you
meant the second one.

> > Right, but why don't you call that nonveridicality? Just as in
> > {le cukta} it doesn't really help us to know what the predicate {cukta}
> > means, then in {lo cukta} it doesn't either. We must go inside the
> > speaker's head to know what is being refered as {le cukta}, or to know
> > what things satisfy {cukta} in that imaginary universe.
>
> I don't call this nonveridicality because it is specificity rather
> than nonveridicality that make {lo} and {le} alike.

What you call selecting a specific universe, I call changing to a
specific nonveridical meaning. I don't see any resulting difference.

> > You may argue that the meaning of {cukta} in that universe will be
> > much related to the meaning of {cukta} that we know, otherwise why not
> > use some other word, since in principle in that universe we could
> > redefine every selbri. But exactly the same applies to {le cukta}.
> > There is a reason why the speaker chose to say {le cukta} over
> > {le panka}.
> I am immune to arguments from pragmatics.

And yet you invoke imaginary worlds, access to which we only have
through pragmatics. Or do you assume that to understand the language
we must know the meaning of each predicate in each possible world?

> (a) A picture or description or story or suchlike, creates (a
> fragment of) an imaginary world, I. We form a new universe, N,
> from the "union" of this world, W, and I, such that anything
> existing in either W or I exists in N. Then we can say:
>   In universe I, Ex balrog(x) & Ey is-model-for-picture(x,y).
>   "There is a picture of a balrog"

I presume "balrog" is a predicate in W? If not, then the problem is
that for me, we are speaking in N, not in W, an arbitrary restriction
of of N containing only those objects satisfying the predicate real().

> > > > (The concept of "imaginary" is already a predicate, I don't see
> > > > the need to make it a metapredicate.)
> It's not clear to me how you'd do "I told a story about a man with
> 3 heads".

        mi te cfika lo cibyselstedu nanmu (noi na nanmu)

Of course, I'm cheating by using lujvo, but I don't think the problem
lies with {lo}. It is a matter of what do we accept as a nanmu. In
English, we quite happily accept a character of fiction to be a man.
We could do the same in Lojban, and then there would be no problem
with {mi te cfika lo cibyselstedu nanmu noi nanmu}, but yes with
{ro nanmu cu morsi}.

In English we live quite happily with the inconsistency: All men are
mortal, but the man with three heads that I described is not mortal.

You want instead to introduce this "imaginary world" trick, but that
is, I think, just a cover up for extending the meaning of {nanmu}.
How are we supposed to understand what things nanmu in that imaginary
world? Only by analogy with the real world, otherwise "I told a story
about a man with three heads" would be equivalent to "I told a story
about a woman with seven legs". There would be no content to the second
part that we could understand only by understanding the predicates
of the language.

> > The quantifiers quantify over all things
> > that we can predicate about, and these are often not real. All they
> > need to do is satisfy some predicate, and we can quantify over them.
> Ah, I see. But to decide whether a proposition is true, we do need
> to know whether things predicated about are real.

I don't see why. "x1 is real" is a predicate like any other. You don't
really need to know whether something satisfies this predicate in order
to know whether it satisfies some other predicate. Unless you take a
really holistic view that you can't really know anything unless you know
everything.

> So to make statements
> that aren't truth-conditionally vacuous we need a way to distinguish
> the real from the imaginary.

We can make the distinction at the predicate level. I don't see the need
for it in some other meta-level.

> > If I draw a picture of my cat (if I had one) would the subject matter
> > be anything other than my cat? That's what I meant by model.
> The subject matter and the model would be your cat. But I could draw
> (from imagination, not from life) a three-headed cat: this would be
> subject-matter but not model.

My question is, is that a mlatu? Does it satisfy the predicate "mlatu"?
If it does, then I have no problem to say you draw {lo mlatu}. If it
doesn't, then you drew something else, perhaps {lo cibyselstedu mlatu}.

> Or, put another way, it is possible for
> the model to exist only in an imaginary world created by the picture.

By "exist" here you don't mean logical E. The model, or subject, obviously
has to exist (E) to satisfy {mi te pixra da}. Now, why would you
call it a mlatu if it doesn't mlatu? What possible relationship, other
than pragmatic, does it have with mlatus? That it is a mlatu in another
world tells us nothing, because we only know what predicates mean in this
world.

> > > ({lohi nu broda gihe na broda} would fairly clearly be non-empty,
> > > but lo dahi god knows whether {lohi nu broda kei gihe na nu broda}
> > > is non-empty.)
> > It is empty, but it is not of the form {lo'i nu <bridi>}.
> Oh? I thought it should yield the intersection of {lohi nu <bridi>}
> and {lohi na nu <bridi>}.

It does. They have an empty intersection, even though neither of them
is empty. Still, the intersection is not of the form {lo'i nu <bridi>}.

> I guess life
> would be easiest for all concerned if we agreed that by default
>    <selbri> = dahinai <selbri>
>    nu = dahi nu
> and that the inconsistency is an accident of history.

I insist that it is an inconsistency only if you view it through the
many worlds interpretation. If you let the {nu broda}s of this world be
things that never happen, then there is no inconsistency, just a very
generous definition for what counts as a {nu broda}.

Jorge