Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 18:02:27 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802172302.SAA03030@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: Summary of summaries on DJUNO X-To: a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: 6b1bdf481ac74e251c9f9aa1d02c8105 X-Mozilla-Status: 8013 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Feb 18 16:03:14 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - >This is not the problem, though it is quite likely that Lojbab >believes it somehow is. Whether or not you believe there are absolute >facts, it remains the case that whenever you assert p in Lojban your >sentence is asserting p to be an absolute fact. No you are asserting it to be TRUE. Absolute means independent of all other considerations. But even given this, asserting that "John knows X" should assert only that John knows X, and not necessarily assert X itself, which is what I see your definition as requiring. >Language and >communication requires that we at least pretend that there are >absolute facts. I think we need a real postmodernist, and not myself, to argue the contrary. The postmodernists most clearly are NOT willing to make such pretensions. I've been involved in theo other side of various debates with postmodernists, and I understand their argument even if I disagree with it. >Lojbab has no response to 2.1. No, I have a different paradigm in mind, and I see the differences implicit in krici/jinvi/djuno, including in their place structures, to render this particular contrast invalid. krici and jinvi do not have epistemology places, and hence there is a difference between djuno and those two above and beyond whether x2 is true (if the truth of x2 is even necessary). Thus > jinvi = justified belief > djuno = justified true belief is an inadequatre contrast since it does not account for the epistemology Furthermore, krici is defined quite clearly to not merely apply to any old belief, but to beliefs that are held without evidence. Thus opinions which are based on evidence are not se krici, and this difference is not the same as "justification", since there are other ways to justify a belief other than by evidence (logical deduction for example) The krici/jinvi/djuno contrast thus appears to be a good paradigm, but it fails based onthe Lojbanic definitions. >His response to 2.2 is that keywords >are not defining. My response to that is that other things being >equal it is better to have a keyword that fits the actual definition >rather than a completely misleading keyword. I agree, but that was not the primary consideration in choosing the keywords, and jhence is an improper argument for the semantics of the Lojban. >His response to 2.3 >involves counterintuitive definitions of {birti}, etc. All the Lojban words may have "counterintuitive" definitions to the English speaker, absed on the English words used to define them. I have attempted to arguie that the very abbreviated definitions given in the gismu list are not adequate to define the words semantically enough to make the decisions people seem to want to make now, suing English-language arguments. They in partcuilar seem to lead people to false paradigms of the 2.1 sort, and I am trying to couynter that by mentioning the actual paradigms that I used when coming up with the definitions. The probably bottom line is that the Lojban word will end up having a vague meaning that includes your definition as well as mine. Since yours is largely a restricted version of mine (all things that you could use djuno for, I could also, but not the reverse), my definition is probably better for the gismu, since (and Colin Fine has argued this better than I have) it is better to have broad gismu and use lujvo to restrict and narrow their definitions. lojbab