Re: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautologies

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/1/2002 2:27:19 PM Central Standard Time, jcowan@reutershealth.com writes:

> {li abu} is another use
> for the letter "a", this time not as a pronoun but as
> the value of a variable, although I'm not very clear
> what type of variable this is supposed to be and how
> it is different from a pronoun.


It is not different at the level of predicate logic.
By convention, its referent is taken to be a mathematical
object.  It is also syntactically different: "ko'a le mlatu" is two
sumti, even if the current referent of "ko'a" is a number,
whereas "ny. le mlatu" is a single sumti meaning "N of
the cats I have in mind".

Does it" here refer to {li abu} or {abu}?  That {li abu} refers to a numeric value of a variable makes a kind of sense.  But to go from that to {abu le mlatu} (is the pause required?  If so, why?) means "a of the rhings I have in mind as cats" is way to curious for Alice (or Abu, for that matter).  How can we know that what we took to refer to Alice does not, in fact, stand for some transcendental number?