Re: [lojban] da and existence

"exists in the UD" is a terrible locution, asking for mistakes; "exists in reality" is also misleading, sinvce the whole UD may be in some alternate reality. In a fantasy story, the universe of that discourse is the things talked about in that story, the things that exist in that story and the things that turn out not to but are talked about anyhow: dragons on the one hand, say, and boogie men on the other. The author, who "exists in reality," doesn't exist there and isn't even in the UD.
I don't think there is a "whole UD", certainly in the sense that there is one that covers all possibilities. Even in limited cases, Iam not at all sure that what we need is a whole UD as opposed to simply a situation (only enough bears to frighten the peasants, not all the bears there might be). As usual in Logic, there are nine-and-ninety ways to set all this up, and every single one of them is right, so we don't have to decide for everyone. Personally, I use situations and allow them to expand as the discourse proceeds (Dialog Analysis, H. Kamp et al.). It is slightly less "logical" and more "languagey", but it works out the same in the end.
{da poi do pensi ke'a} is going to be a thought of some sort, maybe of a unicorn (but not a unicorn in your head -- unicorns are in forests and on virgins' laps). It may be (I'm not sure) that in {do pensi tu'a da}, da picks up a unicorn, but that unicorn is not necessarily one even in the present UD.
I am not sure what an anonymous object is, so I don't know whether I allow them or not. Objects in UD tend to be pretty anonymous unless they are assigned names or given distinctive properties. The most they have in se is haeceity.

From: v4hn <me@v4hn.de>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 5:47 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] da and existence

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 05:53:04PM -0500, Luke Bergen wrote:
> mmm, so it's more of an "exists in our universe of discourse" not
> necessarily "exists in the actual universe". Is that something like
> correct?

Yes. That's something completely different,
but as John pointed out, a fairly common misunderstanding.

A question remains, whether "our universe of discourse" here means
"the whole UD" - whatever that means - or whether this UD is dynamic
and may change with context.
I believe the latter is the case and I've only seen arguments for the
dynamic answer up to now. Is there anyone, who thinks there is just
one possible UD? If not, then I don't see any reason to discuss this. {u'i}

> And actually, in {da poi m[i] pensi ke'a} (if I am thinking about unicorns),
> wouldn't da be assigned to "unicorns" since I'm saying "that thing about
> which I am thinking".

Depends on whether you use an intensional or an extensional reading.
I'm sure there's more than one opinion on that.
At least you're not expressing anything about the fact that {da} refers to some
unicorn/s in your head..

In my opinion it doesn't refer to unicorns, but to an object in the UD
which only has the property that you think about it (up to now).

Given that John doesn't allow 'anonymous objects' w.r.t. the UD
"in the semantics game", he has to provide a different answer.

v4hn