Re: "what i have for dinner"

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

And Rosta wrote:

> This is getting into greater subtleties than I'd originally
> intended. I wonder whether it is "know" that is complicating
> things here, rather than interrogativity per se.

It almost certainly is.  To paraphrase Ursula LeGuin, I can take
a little indirect-question, or a little epistemology, but the
combination is poison.

> Indeed. Oddly, I'm not aware of a profusion of studies of their
> semantics in the linguistics literature.

That's because many people don't think there's a problem, and the
few who do know that it is intractable.  (I found this out via
Linguist List some years ago.)

> I think my former rendition of "know who came" as "for every x, know
> whether x came" (with a further step to translate "whether" into
> logical form) was simpler than what we are proposing here, but I
> never got it to generalize to nonepistemic examples like the
> insurance premium ones above.

Let us consider "wonder", which is nonepistemic.  If I wonder who came
to the party, it does not follow that (Ax) (I wonder whether X came).
For example, I do not wonder whether Julius Caesar came, or the planet Mars,
or the number 4.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis vom dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)