Re: More about questions and the like (was:What I have for dinner...")

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

>From: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
>Pycyn@aol.com wrote:
> > That is the point of xu'a, to remind us that we are in some intensional
> > context like "Greek myths say."   We do treat such sentences as true 
> and ones
> > like "Pegasus is a unicorn" as false without the warning, so, in a logical
> > language, we need the warning, either contextually or explicitly.
>
>I grasp that now, but I think that we need full semantic world-setting, 
>not just
>a syntactic marker.  Ray Smullyan's skeptic, after all, believes that the 
>mental
>states he is experiencing now (while awake) are the same in kind as those he
>experiences while dreaming, merely at a different level --- he would not be
>surprised to "wake up" from this current life.

If we need full semantic world-setting, we should have it in the form of 
sei metalinguistic parentheticals.  If there is an advantage to something 
like xu'a (which is not clear) it would be for brevity.  At which point we 
might find that one of the evidentials or attitudinals will suffice.  ka'u 
or se'o, perhaps, may already be providing the role of xu'a.

lojbab
----
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