On Wed, Dec 11, 2002 at 12:32:45AM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
[...]
> > Yeah. Look, lo means what we say it means, and so does lo'e, and in
> > that of course Wittgenstein was right: meaning is use. But I'm going
> > more and more structuralist, which means that to me, the meaning of
> > {lo'e} is decided by the meaning of {lo}. When you say {lo merko}, you
> > claim some objective knowledge of the membership of {American}.
>
> I don't know how strong a claim you mean to make here. {lo merko}
> means "Ex, x is merko". Does that claim some objective knowledge
> of the membership of {American}? No, in my opinion. One can quite
> legimately deny that objective knowledge even exists. Lojban
> shouldn't rule on epistemological issues, and the ruling is
> unconnected to the difference between o-gadri and e-gadri.
[...]
But it does *claim* objective knowledge. Whether the speaker
actually *has* it is what is legitamately deniable[1], but that
they're *claiming* it doesn't degrade lojban's "philisophical
neutrality". Making rediculously claims is how people talk and
think. For example "If I had more free time I'd go fishing" is an
arguably philisophically rediculous claim (xod was saying something
to this effect the other day[2]), but it's how we think, so things
like mu'ei are justified, and having the ability to make *claims*
of that sort does not do any harm to the pyny.
[1] pe'i the term "objective knowledge" can mean various degrees
of objectivity; but in the strictest (and only the strictest) sense
it's clearly impossible to possess.
[2] Xod's thing was that there's only 1 world, so claims about
"possible worlds" or what "could be" or what is "possible" etc are
a bunch of crap. He was speaking specifically of mu'ei, which I
don't think actually has the problems he described it since the
notion of "world" is much more specifically defined. I tried to
start a thread on this but it's unfortunately painfully apparent
that le'e jboskepre cu to'e nelci lo'enu ri casnu bau la lojban.
--
Jordan DeLong - fracture@allusion.net
lu zo'o loi censa bakni cu terzba le zaltapla poi xagrai li'u
sei la mark. tuen. cusku
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