Re: On {lo} and existence

[jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU]

And:
> In this world there is a state of affairs in which something is blue.
> But there are languages with no word for "blue". These two facts are
> entirely compatible.

Are you saying that there are languages where you cannot explain what
"something is blue" means in English? I very much doubt it. At worst,
you could always coin a new word for it and teach it by pointing at
things, but I'm sure you could explain it within the language too.

What I'm saying is that there is nothing intrinsic about things being
blue, and especially with this example, which is so dependant on human
physiology. The predicate blue() is a convenient convention of the
language, to classify together a bunch of things that we perceive to
have something in common, but quite arbitrary and so whatever proposition
uses that predicate must be an artifice of the language, not something
independent of it.

> I agree that if nothing in this world was blue,
> or perceivable as blue, then we would not expect any language to have
> a word for blue, and the concept of blue would exist in no minds in
> this world. But we could still say that the predicate blue would exist
> but be unknown to any mind.

You mean like the predicate qwepoi() exists but is unknown to any mind?
So that for every da, we have no idea what qwepoi(da) means, and therefore
much less whether it is true or not. I don't really see the point of
postulating propositions that are not accesible through the language.
At least angels have some charm to them, but propositions?

> > What I understand you to be saying is that at least some predicates must
> > somehow be there independently of the world and the speakers.
> I am saying this. I don't really see why it matters.

It matters because without such predicates, all predicates are a convention
of the language, and so in fact their meaning is purely context dependent.
When we say {ta blanu}, the only reason it may be true is that speakers
agree that it is true, and not because of any intrinsic property of the
world. (The reason that speakers agree has to do with similarities and
patterns that they perceive in the world, but not because there is any
intrinsic blueness to ta other than the one we ascribe to it through the
use of language.) In such case, your "inspecting the world to ascertain
the truth value of a proposition", really should be replaced by "holding a
speaker convention to decide on the truth value". We can get away with the
"inspecting the world" fiction because we are pretty similarly working
machines, and so we can be fairly sure that a one speaker convention will
conclude the same as most other speakers.

> One can equally well think of propositions not as "arising", but as
> already existing - as an infinite set of states-of-affairs. When a
> speaker "creates" a new predicate or proposition, this involves picking
> one of those already existing propositions of the shelf.

Wait a second. Creating a new predicate is different from creating a new
proposition. Given a set of predicates, all propositions can be generated
by the grammar. The language consists of the predicates (conventional, as
I see it) and the grammar rules. If you create a new predicate, you are
modifying the language, and you at least need other speakers to agree with
you on its meaning for it to be considered a part of the language.

> It seems to me that we are using "world" in two different senses, one
> defined by reality, and one by reference. Each sense is valid; we must
> simply distinguish them.

Agreed. The one defined by reference is the one relevant for quantification
purposes. The claim {da zo'u ...} means "there is some x in the reference
world, such that...". We can say about things in that reference world
that they are real or non-real, certainly. Why that predicate should have
any special significance in discussing grammar, I don't know.

> Is grammar involved in these issues?

Weren't we discussing grammar? The initial point was that the existence
related to {lo} is referential, not real. Which referents belong to the
real world and which don't is not very relevant in understanding {lo},
that's all.

> To test whether the proposition expressed by {le prenu cu blanu} is
> true of this world, find the referent of {le prenu}. find the set
> of blue things, and see if that latter contains the former.

Right. But how do you find the set of blue things? It's the subset that
speakers conventionally select from the set of all possible referents
to satisfy the predicate blue(). Or is it something more intrinsic?

> To test
> whether the prop expressed by {da blanu} is true of this world, find
> the set of blue things, and see if it's non-empty. What's the problem?

None, as long as you agree that that set is a convention of the language,
and not something that exists independently. In another language you may
need more than one simple predicate to refer to the same set, and more
likely you would refer to a very similar but not quite the same set.
(Probably two speakers of the same language would do the same.)

> > Whatever, but before you evaluate a truth-condition, you need to understand
> > the meaning of the predicate. In natlangs, this meaning is almost always
> > context-sensitive.
> I don't understand "the meaning of the predicate" - the meanings of some
> words are predicates.

Change to "understand the predicate" if you like. In other words, know
which referents satisfy it and which don't, or rather, know what it means
for a referent to satisfy it.

> Are you saying that some words vary in what their
> sense is, depending on the context of the utterance?

I prefer to limit myself to commenting on "predicate words" rather than
words in general. The case of cmavo is more complicated. I am saying that
the meaning of selbri (or their sense, if you like) is context dependent.

> I tend not to agree
> with that, but anyway it's not relevant to truth-conditionality, which
> pertains to the relationship between a meaning and a world, not to
> the relationship between a word and its meaning. [There are no typos
> in the "world"s and "word"s in this para.]

Talking about truth-conditionality is only an easy way of saying that
we are in a position to understand what it means that a proposition
is true or false. The actual determination of the truth value is not
that important here. What we want is to understand what an utterance
means, once we do that, we can worry about whether it is true or not.

Perhaps we are focusing on different stages of the process of
communication. I hold that the part that goes from the words to the
meaning depends on the conventional meanings we assign to predicates,
and that there is nothing there to be mapped onto from the words
before we agree on this convention. This is the crucial part in
understanding an utterance. We may or may not be able to evaluate its
truth value, but we are then able to know what each possible result
of such an evaluation would tell us.

Jorge