Re: djuno debate (was: RE: [lojban] Random lojban questions/annoyances.)

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/24/2001 4:21:26 PM Central Standard Time,
a.rosta@dtn.ntl.com writes:

Personally, though, then as now, I would prefer djuno not to
mean 'know'. I'd like it to mean 'believe' (specifically, for
X djuno Y to mean "X believes X knows Y") and to differ from
krici/jinvi in that if X djuno Y then Y is not necessarily true
but X believes that any right-minded person should also djuno
Y. Typically this would be because there is overwhelming
evidence that Y, or because Y is logically entailed by axioms
or by premises already believed by everyone, and so on. This
would capture the difference between English "I know that P"
and "I believe that P": it would be "I know that P" that would
be translated by "djuno"; that is, "djuno" is the epistemological
state wrt P of someone who would say "I know that P".

Though it pains me to toss over 2500 years of hard-slogging philosophical
work, &'s non-suggestion about {djuno} makes a good deal of sense, certainly
as an explication of what the present definition of {djuno} was meant to
convey, with a small amount of contextual help.  Those axioms or premises or
evidence just are the epistemology and, if it is X's epistemology, then X
presumably believes it and believes that every right-thinking person believes
it and so on.  How far this comes from saying that P is true in that
epistemology, I am not sure (I suppose, overwhelming evidence could still be
wrong, but not, presumably, entailment). I suspect that in enttering the
state of {djuno} , X so modifies the epistemology that P is indeed true in it
as well.  Later evidence may make him revise the epistemology back a bit, to
drop P, and maybe some of the evidence for it, but then it is a different
epistemology.  So, {jetnu} offers no special problems after all.