Re: [lojban] da and existence

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

The "there exists a" reading for the particular quantifier (often called, admittedly, "existential quantifier") is just a mistake, though a fairly natural one. In most contexts, what we are going to talk about are things that (we firmly believe and that's what counts) exist.  But we do occasionally enter into conversations where we talk about things that do not (we believe, again) exist: unicorns, Sherlock Holmes, and so on.  But, since we talk about them, they are in our universe of discourse, even when we actually say "Unicorns don't exist", while discussing whether they can be piebald.  In Lojban, {zasti} is a predicate like any other, which has a corresponding extension which can be anything from the entire universe of discourse to the empty set (not a lot of conversation in this case).  So, {da poi na zasti} is not an automatically failed call-up (it is never the empty set, of course, since that always exist so long as we are talking set theory at all).  Incidentally, your thoughts about unicorns are not unicorns, so the existence of those thought doesn't say anything about the existence of their objects -- though usually, talking about those thoughts will guarantee that the objects are in the UD.

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From: Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 4:25 PM
Subject: [lojban] da and existence

In another thread there were comments that led me to believe that {da} must refer to a thing that actually exists.  The definition also sounds like that is the case:

logically quantified existential pro-sumti: there exists something 1 (usually restricted).

That seems kind of strange to me.  So, does {da poi na zasti} basically mean, by definition, the empty set?

And does that mean that I have to be very careful when using {da} to make sure that we're talking about existent things?

i.e. if I'm thinking about unicorns what does it mean for me to say {da poi mi pensi ke'a cu cinri}.  I guess in that example it might be ok since my (thoughts about unicorns) do exist but... still, seems weird for {da} to require existence (if in fact I'm understanding the definition correctly).

mi'e la .cribe.

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