RE: "What I have for dinner depends on what there is in the fridge"

["Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 07:54 AM 12/2/99 -0800, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>From: "Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>
>la i,n cusku di'e
>>lambda x: E(x)
>>
>>i.e. the function which assigns truth values to the expression E(...) 
>>given any
>>value of the {kau}-tagged variable x.
>>
>>This implies you know the whole story - who came and who didn't come
>>(given the long-ago-snipped example).
>
>I don't think you need to know who didn't come if
>you know who came. You could deduce it, but that's
>another story. The problem is that the predicate "know"
>is especially confusing to treat these issues. If we change
>to "John told me who came" it is more clear that he didn't
>necessarily tell me who didn't came.
>
>Would it be correct to say that he told me the function?
>Or did he tell me what is the function, which is again
>substituting one indirect question with another?

Given the need to cover both "told" and "know", I think that what John 
would know or tell would be "a description of the set", which might be an 
enumeration of all members or a statement of their critical defining 
property(ies).

Even so, you still have John's cognition as a limitation.  If John forgot 
one person in his enumeration of who came, is it still true that "John told 
me who came"?  So we might have to switch that from a set to a mass 
description to accurate capture the way such phrases are used in natlangs.

lojbab
----
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