Re: [lojban] Re: Lojban and Truth-Conditional Semantics

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 7:18 AM, la klaku <jakobnybonissen@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Is the truth condition of {mi
> po'o broda} the same as {mi le no drata cu broda}?

(I guess "le" is supposed o be ".e")

I'd say basically yes.

> Does {a'o ko'a
> broda} have the same truth conditions as {ko'a broda}? Why not?

Because it's not the kind of thing that has truth conditions.
Propositions have truth conditions, and the expression you quote
contains a proposition as a component, but it is not itself a
proposition. Utterances have felicity conditions, and the felicity
conditions for an a'o-utterance are (roughly, in my view) as follows:

- The speaker does not know whether the proposition is true or false.
- If the proposition were true, the speaker would be happy.

If the speaker knows that the proposition is true, the utterance is
not felicitous (you can't really hope for something that you know is
the case. You can be happy about it, you can hope it remains being the
case, and so on, but not hope that it is the case.)

OTOH, if the speaker knows that the proposition is false, they can't
really hope for it to be true either. They could wish that it were
true, they could hope that it became true, but not hope that it is
true.

So in my view "ui", ".a'o" and ".au" form kind of a triad:

"ui broda" is felicitous when the speaker knows broda to be true, and
broda being true makes them happy.
".a'o broda" is felicitous when the speaker does not know whether
broda is true or not, and broda being true would make them happy.
".au broda" is felicitous when the speaker knows broda is not true,
and broda being true would make them happy.

(I'm sure not everyone agrees with that.)

> How
> does {da'i} *actually* work?

That's harder.

> And so I could go on. The worst offender
> here is probably the implicit CAhA, since an implicit {ka'e} can wreck
> all efforts of trying to establish reasonalbe truth conditions.

I think thinking in terms of implicit tags is about as bad as thinking
in terms of implicit quantifiers.

CAhA should be interpreted as any other tag, so that they can be
basically eliminated in favor of tagless sentences. For example "ka'e
broda" is just a condensed form of "lo nu broda cu cumki".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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