From jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU  Sat Mar  6 22:46:41 2010
From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Subject:      Re: On {lo} and existence
Date: Fri Mar 10 22:59:55 1995
Status: RO
X-From-Space-Date: Fri Mar 10 22:59:55 1995
X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu
Message-ID: <Qau7QQ0Q_FO.A.QcG.Rv0kLB@chain.digitalkingdom.org>

And:
> > What is a proposition? Is it derived from a sentence or from an
> > utterance?
> From an utterance. Because of things like deictics and +specific
> references, many sentences will not yield complete propositions.

Ok, now to probe further. Does every utterance (use of a well formed
sentence) determine a unique proposition? Or are there other factors
that intervene?

What kind of proposition does something like {ai mi klama} determine?

> But note that the proposition derived by grammatical rules (augmented
> by reference assignment) from an utterance is not necessarily the only
> proposition communicated. This is especially obvious with irony.

Does the meaning of predicates enter into the grammatical rules?
If I remember correctly, you consider the equivalence or not of
for example {mleca} and {se zmadu} to be determined grammatically,
so the meaning of predicates would have to be a part of the grammar
rules.

Or are the rules independent of meaning, so that we only need to
know the selmaho of each word to determine the proposition?

If meaning enters, why couldn't a more sophisticated grammatical
analysis detect irony as well?

> > If, on the other hand, it is derived from an utterance, the context is
> > already determined, and then its truth value is also determined. Then
> > there is no crime in saying that an utterance has a truth value, it is
> > well defined, it's the truth value of the proposition associated with it.
>
> First, even if we have determined the context, and can therefore
> establish the x3 of true(proposition3234,world2,?), the resulting
> truth value doesn't inhere to proposition3234.

It doesn't matter. The utterance still has a well defined truth value,
even if it is not inherent to its proposition, it is inherent to the
utterance.

> Second, the context is not determined. The comprehender recursively
> expands the context until a relevant interpretation of the utterance
> is found.

At which point, we have our proposition. Then context is determined
by the comprehender. The truth value can only be assigned to the
relevant interpretation, I suppose. When we talk of *the* truth value
of a given proposition in a given world, we mean the one assigned to
the relevant interpretation of the "typical" comprehender. Or what?
We need a context before we can assign a truth value.

> Thus, whoever interprets an utterance chooses their own
> context. Two people hearing the same utterance may choose different
> contexts.

I agree, and they may therefore end up giving it a different truth
value. *The* truth value, if there is such a thing, would have to
be a pondered average of those given by each comprehender.

> > > I take "imaginary" and "not of this universe" to be the same.
> > This is the root of our disagreement then. In that case, I agree you
> > can talk about things "not of this universe". But the quantifiers
> > quantify over these without any difficulty. There's no need for
> > any special marking at the level of quantification. The distinction,
> > if needed, is made by a predicate, {xanri} or some such.
>
> Fine. This is what I've been advocating.
>
>     {nu} without explicit {dahinai} is associated with implicit {dahi}.
>     All other predicates without explicit {dahi} have implicit {dahinai}
>
> {dahinai} = real. {dahi} = real or imaginary. "Real" means "real in the
> universe of discourse". "Imaginary" means "not real in the universe of
> discourse".

I think I see now why you say that {nu} would be an exception. You want

        ro da'inai nu broda cu fasnu

to be necessarily true. I don't. If {nu} is only a potential event,
then {da'inai nu} is still only a potential event. In your language,
I would say it is a potential event in this world, while presumably
{da'i nu} would be a potential event in some other world.

My position now is that I would like that {ro nu broda cu fasnu}.
Otherwise, if it is decided that {ro nu broda na fasnu}, then
that should be equivalent to {ro da'inai nu broda na fasnu}, so that
there is no exception in the use of {da'i}.

Jorge