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Re: [lojban] {.au}/{djica}={.ai}/{?}. No gismu for intention

Mike S. wrote:

On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 6:52 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com
<mailto:jjllambias@gmail.com>> wrote:
    At least no claim or assertion can do it, but you can use a
    proposition for other purposes than making claims. "ca'e" is supposed
    to mark a sentence as a performative (despite its gloss), so if you
    say "ca'e mi jarco lo nu mi brodu lo nu klama"; "I hereby express my
    intention to go", you are thereby expressing an intention to go. So
    ".ai" could be taken as an abreviated form of "ca'e mi jarco lo nu mi
    brodu". Similarly for other attitudinals, "ui" is similar to "ca'e mi
    jarco lo nu mi gleki", "I hereby display my happiness", and so on.
    (The wordy form doesn't quite have the same practical effect though.)

I would think that ".ui" simply means "I am happy", not "I display my
happiness".
No. It means neither, because both of those are truth-functional claims, and "ui" is not. 


Either way, if the speaker is actually unhappy,
then he isn't really speaking Lojban. (or as you suggest below, he is delusional)
Attitudinals are emotional expressions. In theory "ui" should be the same as what other-language speakers do when they express happiness non-verbally. 


I think
that we have to admit that he is being disingenuous to his audience if
he utters ".ui" with no hint of irony.


He is being meaningless - expressing noise in a confusing manner.


Because of this, I think these
attitudinals are as truth-functional as any brivla: they evaluate to a
real truth value


By definition they do not.


given two arguments: the speaker and the proposition
that the attitudinal is embedded in. Obviously it's hard to know if a
person is truthful in the expression of his own feelings,
One cannot be untruthful. One can either express one's feelings or one can fail to express one's feelings, possibly making irrelevant noises in the process. 


Even more so in the case with the irrealis attitudinals.  If I say ".ai
[I am giving you a million bucks tomorrow]" when I know that I am
bankrupt and all my banking accounts are overdrawn then clearly I am
lying to you.
It is probably false that you are giving a million bucks. The attitudinal is irrelevant to that falsehood. (by my understandiong, "irrealis" means that the attitudinal is irrelevant to the truth-functional value of the proposition) 


".ai mi dunda la lunra do" is simply (literally) false
when uttered by any non-delusional interlocutor.
iff it is false when the ".ai" is omitted, then it is false with the "ai" included.
But the emotional expression of ".ai" could still be quite honest, even if it would be delusional to think the underlying proposition to be true.
Emotions are NOT "logical", nor truth-functional. Most people probably prefer it that way, even if it makes them sometimes seem a bit delusional. So long as we can clearly distinguish between the claim and the emotional expression, this causes no problem in communication.
When you start trying to make attitudinals truth-functional, you kill the whole point in having them in the language, which is to allow expression of emotions without having to worry about "truthiness". Assigning truth to attitudinals INVITES people to lie using them, whereas the expressions of attitude in natural language generally are not subject to such analysis.
The example I like to use for this are most uses of obscenities in English. When my dad talked about the "f***ing door being left open" he was not attributing reproductive activity on the part of an inanimate object, and indeed there was no truth functionality to that adjective - it was expressing an attitude towards the state being described. We might argue about what attitude he was expressing, (and the point of Lojban attitudinals is to enable one to be clear in expressing one's attitudes if one wishes), but one would not legitimately be able to say that my dad was lying either about the door or about his emotions in making that expression. 

--
Bob LeChevalier    lojbab@lojban.org    www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.


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