From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Wed Mar 29 00:50:35 1995 From: jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU Date: Wed Mar 29 00:50:35 1995 Subject: Re: On {lo} and existence Status: RO Message-ID: And: > The reference of {ro broda} is determined with respect to an only-real > world. Unless it's {ro dahi broda}. Wouldn't that depend on the meaning of broda? Suppose {broda} is "x1 is non-real". Are you saying that {ro broda} has no referents in an only-real world? Couldn't someone use that predicate in that world? Suppose I define {ro da broda ijo da da'i brode}. Doesn't that blurr the distinctions? I find {da'i} to be a useful cmavo, which modifies the meaning of a predicate, but I don't think it can be used in explaining the meaning of {lo}. {lo broda} can be equivalent to {lo da'i brode} for appropriately chosen broda and brode. > > 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. > > {da broda} is: "There is some x *in the reference world* that *in an > only-real world* is a broda" > > {dahinai} = in the relevant only-real world > {dahi} = in the reference world Are all the referents of the relevant only-real world real? > Consider sets, like, say {3, 17, 30}. What makes that set exist? Nothing > makes it exist; it just does. You can't find the set by mindlessly > inspecting the world, and nor can you find the set of blue things by > mindlessly inspecting the world. I agree with that. They both exist by convention. The set of blue things is more conventional than the set {3, 17, 30}, and the set of big things is even more so. None of them would "exist" (in a referential sense) without a language to support them. That seems to be trivial, how can there be referents without references, and how can there be references without language, which is by definition what language is. Other types of existence may be philosophically important, but not very relevant in dealing with grammar, I think. The only existence that grammar deals with is the referential one. The others are dealt with by predications within the language. (For example the predicate {dacti} deals with physical existence.) > > 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. > > How do we analyse the meaning of an utterance? One way is to state what > conditions would have to obtain in the world for the meaning to be true. Is stating those conditions any different from reproducing the utterance, or perhaps rewording it in a more precise way? Consider again the utterance {da blanu}. How do we state the conditions that would have to obtain in the world for the meaning to be true? Wouldn't they be just that da blanu? > This method has the advantage of rigour and precision, but the disadvantage > of not being how language really works. I'm not sure what the method is supposed to accomplish. Is the method a series of rules, for example to go from {mi e do klama} to {mi klama ije do klama}, and other more complicated ones, that take us from the utterance to some other sentence that looks more like what a proposition is supposed to look? I agree that those rules are important, but they don't tell us much about, for example, what {da blanu} means. For that we need the conventions of the language. You may call that a psychological view, but I don't see how else we can understand its meaning. > Another way is to take a more > psychological view of meaning, and thereby be more plausible but less > rigorous and precise. But where is the rigorous and precise meaning of {da blanu}? What good does us postulating the existence of an eternal proposition associated with it? How does that help us to understand anything, if we are still going to have to fall back on the psychological view to go from the words to that abstract proposition. What's the difference between saying that the proposition is there but we need a language convention to access it, or that the language convention is what constitutes the proposition? I don't see why we need to have the proposition existing beforehand, it would seem better to use Occam's razor to dispose of it. > I'd have thought that the "design specification" > of Lojban ought to favour rigour and precision, while if it were to > become a native language, the other approach would be preferable. That's > how things have been done with Lojban syntax. What rigour and precision? What rigorous and precise conclusion can we extract from {da blanu} other than that da blanu? And how do we understand what that means other than by being speakers of the language, i.e. by being an insider in the convention? Jorge