Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 1:15 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Okay, not exactly a tautology, but failing in a particularly questionable way.  That is, {zo'e brode} is false (or, at least, not true) just in case there are no brode, in which case {zo'e} is referentless, to the disgust of Griceans and the puzzlement of logicians.

I don't think that's how "zo'e" works. Sentences with "zo'e" must be able to be false, otherwise sentences with "zo'e" are not very informative.

Consider questions, for example. If someone asks "xu da zvati"? "Is anyone at?" can the question be at all meaningful? It can only be meaningful if the zo'e in zvati2 can have a value, one obvious from context, possibly "here" or whatever other relevant place we had been talking about. If we must understand "zo'e" to mean "the value that makes the sentence true", then the only answer we could truthfully give to that question is "go'i", but that wouldn't be at all informative to the questioner. Sure, there is almost certainly a value for "zo'e" that will make "da zvati zo'e" true, but that's not what the questioner wants to know.

The value of "zo'e" is a value obvious from context (or unimportant), but not necessarily one that will make the sentence true. In most cases the sentence will be true, but not by virtue of the value of zo'e being determined by that, but rather because in most cases assertions are true or at least intended to be true. 

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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