Re: [lojban] Not talking about imaginary worlds

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 7/2/2001 7:12:29 PM Central Daylight Time, b.gohla@gmx.de
writes:

by saying "suppose X" you walk into a room with the specific property that X
is always true within it, so you can talk treating X as a fact, no matter
if
it it true in the "physical" world.

the advantange of my approach is that it is easily applied recursively, and
that from the perspective of any specific universe it is itself "real"  and
all derived ones are speculative, when you enter a derived universe it in
turn becomes reality.

Well, if that helps you comprehend the situation then well and good.  But I
think it important to distinguish between fiction and speculation.  In
fiction, once you have passed into the X room, there are no restrictions on
what room you can go to next and settle into --a fictor is is limited only by
what he chooses to do.  But speculation always comes back to the base world
and so the further doors are limited by what is left of this world.  If you
want to speculate about what would happen if Socrates were a 19th century
Irish washer-woman, you are restricted by the character of Socrates (whatever
it is that you carry over) and what is reasonably clear about 19th century
Irish washer-women -- this is part of the accessibility relation between
worlds in a speculative modality. Using the whole structure of possible
worlds for speculation then seems excessive -- and probably misleading.