From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:45:25 2010 Reply-To: ucleaar Sender: Lojban list Date: Tue Dec 19 17:25:42 1995 From: ucleaar Subject: Re: TECH HARANGUE: LE/LO X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 19 17:25:42 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Message-ID: Xorxe s: > > > > (In {Koa krici leduu le broda cu brode} there is an ambiguity, > > > > as to who knows which thing it is that koa believes to be a brode > > > > - it may be either me, the speaker, or koa. > > > The default should be the speaker > > If there is an ambiguity, it is in who knows the identity of the thing > > that is a brode - who knows who brodes. > The speaker must know it, and the audience must know it, in order for > communication to occur. If koa believes the proposition "brode(X)" (or "brode(X) & broda(X)"), how should one report this, when only koa knows the identity of X? I don't think lu..liu shd come into it. If you & John agree that the identity of the referent of {le} shd always be known to the speaker, then I guess we can use John's old method (something about Orwat being a spy? - it had to do with spies, anyway): da zou koa krici leduu da brode (gie da broda) > > but in this case, we must know which lu le broda cu brode li'u the > > speaker is talking about, and it is quite possible that there has > > never been any utterance expressing a bridi that corresponds to what > > koa believes. > If there was no such utterance, explicit or implied, then the reporter > has no business telling us that koha has such belief. How could they > know? I doubt you really believe this. Mayn't the reporter be afforded a way of speaking conjecturally about koa's beliefs, without saying that koa said anything? > > There must be standard answers to this problem, well known to, e.g. > > pc & John, concerning examples about knowing whether pole stars are > > evening stars, Cicero is Tully, Oedipus's wife is his mother, etc etc. > I don't know whether there is a standard answer. Here is my attempt: > la kikeron du la tulis > i la djan na djuno la'e lu la kikeron du la tulis li'u > i la djan krici la'e lu la kikeron na du la tulis li'u > i la djan cu toldrani This must be on the right track, but using {lu} causes more problems than it solves. Which utterance is being referred to? A certain hypothetical utterance? {le dahi me lu la kikeron du la tulis li'u}? > > God forbid I should restart the opacity debate. > I don't think this is quite the same thing. Opacity had to do > with whether the quantification was a part of the inner proposition > or the outer one. But Tully's case has to do with whether the inner > proposition is being generated by the speaker or whether the speaker > is just parroting someone else's words. No parroting of words is involved; you mistake the nature of the matter at issue. When we were discussing opacity, the issues we were discussing concerned the relative scope of quantifiers and irrealis (modal, belief) elements. I'm not quite sure whether labelling that as "opacity" is standard. I think they're also de dicto / de re ambiguities, which may or may not be the same thing as opacity. The Cicero/Tully, Morning Star/Evening Star examples should, I feel (& as pc says), be handled the same way (i.e. in scope terms), but it requires supposing names to work semantically like mass nouns (i.e. with senses) [a step which I think is rather attractive], so "Cicero is Tully" is like "water is H2O" and "salt is sodium chloride"; the senses are different even if they're extensionally equivalent. When she doesn't know Bruce Wayne is Batman: She believes Bruce Wayne is a millionaire. {koa krici leduu ro da poi kea me lao lao Bruce Wayne lao zou da megricfu} {koa krici leduu ro me lao lao Bruce Wayne lao cu megricfu} {koa krici leduu ro da na ge me lao lao Bruce Wayne lao gi na megricfu} She believes Batman is a millionaire. {ro da poi kea me lao lao Batman lao zou koa krici leduu da megricfu} {ro me lao lao Batman lao goi koe zou koa krici leduu koe megricfu} {ro da zou na ge da me lao lao Batman lao gi na ku koa krici leduu da megricfu} John will have to confirm that {me} is rightly used here. John: > > There must be standard answers to this problem, well known to, e.g. > > pc & John, concerning examples about knowing whether pole stars are > > evening stars, Cicero is Tully, Oedipus's wife is his mother, etc etc. > *growl* Lojban is not supposed to solve philosophical problems. It may > occasionally make them easier to express -- much of Quine seems to have > been written in Lo{gl,jb}an and then poorly translated into English. But these are logicophilosophicosemantic problems, and these we may indeed hope lojban will solve, since it is founded on this kind of logic. --- And