From cowan Tue Oct 3 10:00:24 1995 Subject: Re: tense conversions From: John Cowan To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban List) Date: Tue, 3 Oct 1995 10:00:24 -0400 (EDT) In-Reply-To: <199510022314.TAA28235@locke.ccil.org> from "jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU" at Oct 2, 95 06:49:08 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 1792 Status: OR Message-ID: > la kris cusku di'e > > > In other words, I think "le bolci pu'o farlu" means "the ball will start > > falling", not "the ball is about to fall". la xorxes. cusku di'e > Are you saying that {ca pu'o} means the same as {ba co'a}? I don't agree. That doesn't follow. As I said the other day, {ba co'a} entails nothing about the present; the event might already be in progress. {ca pu'o} excludes that possibility. > I think the difference between those two is precisely that the first > describes the present and the second describes the future. For a claim > about the present to be true, the actual future is irrelevant. For a claim > about the future to be true, what is claimed must end up happening in > the future. I grant the second point, but I deny the first one. The claim about the present is precisely that we are in the {pu'o} portion of an actual event. (Note: in the following, is a notation for a tenseless claim.) Consider the world line of the ball. There either or a ball- falling-event somewhere along that world line. If there one, then it is the case that for some t1, at time t1 we in the "pu'o" portion of that event. If no such event , then there can be no such time t1, and in particular, the claim that t1 = the present is necessarily false. But someone making such a claim is not lying, because claims about the future are not lies. This is a fact about claims, not about the future. To lie is to say what you know is not true, and since you don't know the future (even though the world-line model presumes that the future is knowable), any claim with "ba" or "pu'o" cannot be a lie unless it claims something that you now know to be impossible. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban.