[lojban] Re: {le} and {lo} ... and Keith Donnellan?

[la gleki <gleki.is.my.name@gmail.com>]

xorlo, bi'unai, Spinoza and Keith Donnellan.

So let's get started.

Every child being born gets his/her experience in the form of particular feelings. E.g. the word "mother" denotes only one object, namely, "The Mother" of this child. "Apple" denotes only the apple being given to this child. The realisation of the fact that there are other objects named apples comes later. This is the way from direct feeling of events to abstractions. This the way to true science the main principle of which is "the repeatability of events must exist" (i.e. if this is an apple then may be other apples can emerge in future). This is how the word "any" comes into lexicon of every child ("Give me any apple" whereas earlier the child can only want to say "Give the apple in front of me" (even if the child can't express that in words. It doesn't matter. I'm talking about his/her desire to say that. The child can express that in gestures or something else).

Not that grown-ups lose such ability of describing specific objects. It's just the frequency of this concept (of specific objects being sensed) that slowly drops in speech and experience until reaching some level.

I'm not an expert on Spinoza but it seems that his concept of triple knowledge (opinion, reason, intuition) actually describes subjective knowledge (personal opinion), objective knowledge (science formed by voting of experts on a given topic) and direct feeling (something that you know from your own experience and no one else can, see the discussion of {vedli} in a separate thread).

Now let's turn to Donellan's views.

The main difference is in the sentence

(1) Smith's murderer is insane

Attributive use: the sentence is used to say something about whoever uniquely murdered Smith. Paradigm case: (1) is asserted on purely general grounds.

Referential use: the sentence is used to say something about a particular person { the one we have in mind. Paradigm case: (1) is asserted on the basis of odd behavior by the defendant

The contrast with such an attributive use of (1) is one of those situations in which we expect and intend our audience to realize whom we have in mind when we speak of Smith's murderer and, most importantly, to know that it is this person about whom we are going to say something.

Another important thing is that Donnellan uses Russell’s definition of denoting: ‘a definite description denotes an entity if that entity fits the description uniquely’. But, like Strawson, he thinks of referring as a relation between a speaker that the thing he or she means to be talking about. 

The keyword here is "uniquely". I think it's identical to the concept of "the apple" that we have with the child in the beginning of this post.

Now what xorlo has to do with it?

lo [PA] broda = zo'e noi ke'a broda [gi'e zilkancu li PA lo broda]

le [PA] broda = zo'e noi mi ke'a do skicu lo ka ce'u broda [gi'e zilkancu li PA lo broda]

I'm not sure that {skicu} is the right word. I'm not sure if {le} corresponds to referential use.

Of course referential use can't be expressed with {bi'unai} because {bi'unai} can refer to *any* {broda} that we encountered earlier. And {bi'unai} is more about information known, not about specific object that the speaker and the listener agreed to talk about.

That's all that I can say about Donellan's views for now. May be additional comments from me will come later.

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