Date: Sat, 28 Feb 1998 11:09:32 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802281609.LAA13307@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Summary so far on DJUNO X-To: jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: 3988558b2eb6e9e4cdd2aba7f606ffad Status: O X-Mozilla-Status: 8011 X-From-Space-Date: Mon Mar 02 13:44:05 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - >What the true-x2 definition does not allow you to say is: "I know that >Sherlock Holmes lives on Wall Street using the epistemology of A.C." >(Well, you're allowed to say it, but it would be false. Under your >definition it could be true.) But it's NOT true that Sherlock Holmes lives on Baker Street, because Sherlock Holmes is not and never was alive. I know that he lives ONLY by contemplating a known-false (i.e. fictional) epistemology. And I know he "lives" only by presuming the timelessness of literature, since the Victorian era ended almost a hundred years ago. I don't even know if there still IS a Baker Street in London. The only way I can make x2 true in a statement about Sherlock Holmes as-real is if I limit the universe of discourse to AC Doyle's works (which I did not explicitly, nor to my knowledge implicitly do). Now someone can say that invoking an author of fiction as an epistemology implicitly invokes his fictional world as the metaphysical universe. But I nefver gave any indication that my epistemology was invoking a fictional world. Thus you have no basis FROM MY STATEMENT to treat an invocation of AC Doyle as an epistemology any differently from an invocation of Albert Einstein (who do far as I know never published any fiction). If you want to call a statement TRUE you MUST qualify it by the metaphysics or I have no idea what you mean. lojbab