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Re: [jboske] Lojban is fxxxed



Jorge Llambias scripsit:

> How else do you say something like: "For every woman John goes out
> with, he believes that she will be the woman of his life."

The only 100% safe way is to go up to the metalinguistic level, and say
"For every woman John goes out with, the sentence created by substituting
a unique name of the woman for 'vzv' in the kernel 'vzv will be the woman
of John's life' is a representation of one of John's beliefs."

The basic trouble is that you cannot substitute equals for equals in
belief-expressions reliably. If John believes that the president of Russia
is bald, and John also believes (falsely) that the president of Russia
is Yeltsin, do we conclude that John believes that Yeltsin is bald, or
that John believes that Putin is bald? Similar stories can be told of
Hesperus-Phosphorus, or about Ortcutt the spy.

Let us take up the last. George believes that the man in the brown hat is
a spy, and George believes that Ortcutt is not a spy. (Changing from de dicto
to de re will not help; then it becomes "George believes '\x.x is a spy' of
the man in the brown hat" and "George believes '\x.~x is a spy' of Ortcutt".
But Ortcutt is the man in the brown hat. George's beliefs are flatly
contradictory, yet both are reasonable.

-- 
A poetical purist named Cowan [that's me: jcowan@reutershealth.com]
Once put the rest of us dowan. [on xml-dev]
"Your verse would be sweeter http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
If it only had metre http://www.reutershealth.com
And rhymes that didn't force me to frowan." [overpacked line!] --Michael Kay