Re: [lojban] Lojban and Truth-Conditional Semantics

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 1:39 AM, maikxlx <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:
>  In other words, from any
> given Lojan sentence S, e.g. "su'o lo ctuca cu tavla ro le tadni", one ought
> to be able to work out, in a straightforward manner, every truth condition
> that would make S true with respect to an interpretation of basic terms
> (e.g. descriptions & predicates) and a given model (universe of discourse).
[...]
> To
> give a trivial example of how truth-conditions might be specified very, very
> informally using English as the metalanguage:
>
> S = "la meris prami la djan."
>
> The truth conditions of S are (tentatively) as follows:
>
> - There is an individual entity M whom Speaker denotes as "meris"
> - There is an individual entity J whom Speaker denotes as "djan"
> - There is a predicate relationship (x1, x2) denoted as "prami", interpreted
> as the set of all ordered pairs of individuals such that x1 loves x2 (full
> encyclopedia definition of a predicate can be cited as needed).
> - prami'(M, J) is true.  In other words, M loves J.

But it's easy enough to do that for the other sentence as well (or for
any sentence):

S = "su'o lo ctuca cu tavla ro le tadni"

The truth conditions of S are as follows:

- There are individual entities C whom Speaker denotes as "lo ctuca"
- There are individual entities T whom Speaker denotes as "le tadni"
- There is a predicate relationship (x1, x2) denoted as "tavla",
interpreted as the set of all ordered pairs of individuals such that
x1 talks to x2 (full encyclopedia definition of a predicate can be
cited as needed).
- Ex in C, Ay in T tavla(x, y) is true.  In other words, for some x
among C, for all y among T, x talks to y.

I doubt anyone has any issue with that. The issue in this round of
discussion seems to be about the "given model (universe of discourse)"
part. If you take that as a given, there is no discussion to be had.
If you don't take it as a given, then in some context the individual
entities whom Speaker denotes as "lo ctuca" might be John, Alice and
Mary, while in a different context they might be math teachers,
English teachers and biology teachers, or good teachers, bad teachers
and regular teachers, or ... And given that we can have different
domains, there is the issue of what happens when you want to jump from
one domain to another, when you want to deduce what happens in one
domain when all you have are facts from a different domain. Or how can
Speaker give enough information so that Listener can figure out what
the domain is without too much trouble.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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