From mark@kli.org Wed Aug 25 18:31:50 1999 X-Digest-Num: 221 Message-ID: <44114.221.1212.959273825@eGroups.com> Date: 26 Aug 1999 01:31:50 -0000 From: mark@kli.org Subject: Re: Anselmisms and gadro X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 1212 >From: "Jorge Llambias" >Date: Wed, 25 Aug 1999 08:56:27 PDT > >From: "Jorge Llambias" > > >la mark cusku di'e > >>The thing to remember about all this is that {lo broda} is the same, >>semantically, as {da poi [ke'a] broda}, with the exception that the latter >>also asserts the existence of such a thing, while the >>former doesn't. > >I disagree about the exception. They are the same in all respects. >A sumti by itself doesn't assert the existence of anything. >If you say either {lo broda cu brode} or {da poi broda cu brode} >then you need for at least one thing to be a broda in order for >both assertions to be true. And that the thing also be a brode, >of course. Well, I understand that that's the official take on it, and I'm not sure I can disagree. After all, it makes a difference. Let's see... given the lujvo {zilcrida} meaning "fairy" but with the x2 (mythos) place removed: "real life" fairies. If I say lo zilcrida cu blanu / a fairy is blue (I'd actually be more likely to say loi zilcrida) if there actually are no real-life fairies, I'd think my statement would be considered true. Statements about members of the nullset are true, right? But da poi zilcrida cu blanu / something1 which-is-a fairy is blue is considered the same as {so'u da zo'u da poi zilcrida...}: there exists at least one x1, such that it's a fairy, is blue. And if there are no fairies, then the statement is false, since I asserted existence. I thought the {lo} way of doing it referred to a (putative) member of the set without necessarily asserting its existence. A sumti doesn't assert existence, but I thought that free variables are implicitly quantified by {su'o} and implicitly in a prenex. >>({le broda} is correspondingly {da voi broda}). > >I think that's not right. {le broda} is each of the broda >I have in mind, {da voi broda} is some thing that I am >describing as a broda. The quatifier is crucially different. >{le broda} is {roda voi broda}. Usually we have only one >thing in mind when using {le}, in which case the difference >disappears, but not in the general case. > >>Similarly, "the x such that >>Fyx" is {da poi de se broda da[/ke'a]} in {da poi} syntax, > >That's "some x such that ..." not "the x such that...", which >is what pc wanted. This is the age-old chestnut of Lojban's habit of conflating non-veridicality with specificity. There's not much I can do about that. ~mark