Re: [lojban] Re: other-centric UI

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Well, it depends (as I first wrote on this issue in 1976) on what "I intend to 
dance" means.  If it is, for example, false if I really have no such intention, 
the "ai" is totally inappropriate.  If it *expresses* your intention (whether 
you have one or not) , it is not truth functional at all, but only carried out 
or not.  Now, the difference is hard to tell sometimes (why would one express an 
intention one did not have? -- perhaps to urge him toward that intention, etc,) 
, but, in what ever vestigial sense Lojban is still a logical language, the 
difference is crucial.  Of course, unmarked bridi can be untrue -- else how 
could one lie -- or write fiction (which come to the same thing, after all)  But 
they can't be counterfactual (which is a very different matter, logically), 
since that takes us out of present contexts into contexts generated verbally as 
we go along (this is eventually gets into the opaque contexts which are at the 
root of the problems with xorlo -- as expounded the last time xorxes deigned to 
give something approaching a serious explanation; it may totally different now, 
as that one was from the time before).  Fiction, of course, creates its own 
context, which may be radically different from the "real world" or "common 
world" where we start, but that context is holistic, where as counterfactual are 
incidental.  A story that was all counterfactual would never get told, since the 
context never emerged.  So, of course, you don't use counterfactual flags 
throughout a story, no matter how different its context is from the here and 
now.


----- Original Message ----
From: Stela Selckiku <selckiku@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, September 12, 2010 9:25:16 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: other-centric UI

On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 9:46 PM, Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> {.i .ai mi dansu} does NOT mean "I intend to dance."

That's exactly what it means.  I use {.ai} in that sense like a dozen
times a day.

I'll repeat what I've said before in response to the argument that
unmarked bridi cannot be counterfactual or untrue: You're going to get
very tired of saying {da'i} or {je'u nai} if you ever try to write a
piece of fiction. :P

mi'e la stela selckiku
mu'o

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