Message-Id: <199510042220.SAA14431@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Wed, 4 Oct 1995 22:18:00 +0100
Reply-To: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>
Subject:      tenses
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: OR

I trust that we have established (i) that {ba broda} logically claims
that some event of brodaing is located at some time that is after
{ba} (the word), (ii) that {ba broda} is false if no event of brodaing
is located at some time after {ba}, (iii) that to assert {ba broda}
is to be on epistemically shaky ground, (iv) that (iii) does not have
any bearing on the accuracy of (i-ii), and (v) that the word LIE does
not mean "say something that is untrue".

Lojbab
> Thus I am inclined to accept the ruling that it doesn't matter whether
> the ball actually falls off the table

It does matter to the truth of the statement. It generally won't matter
to whether it is an appropriate thing to say. (There can be little
doubt that truth has negligible influence on what we choose to say.)

> What matters is that the speaker is intensionally viewing the
> falling-off-of-the-table as a complete event.

Suppose koa started to eat an apple, but never finished it, and
suppose you don't want to falsely claim that there was an event
of koa eating an apple, which is what {koa coa citka pa plise} would
do (I presume). What one should in those circumstances say is, I
suggest, {coa dahi nu koa citka pa plise} or {coa nu dahi koa citka
pa plise}, where {dahi} has the function of expanding the universe
to include the imaginable as well as the actual.
[Chris uses {dahi} to mean "suppose", as in the first sentence of this
para, but {rua} would seem to be fitter for some of those uses.]

----
And