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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2



On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 9:55 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:


On 5 Oct 2014 23:38, "Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> The presupposition is that when you use "lo plise" there's something you are talking about, and that something is identified by their satisfying the predicate "plise".

What sort of identification is this? It sounds like you're saying lo is definite, and attributing to it the sense I had understood le to have, with nonveridical description?


I looked up "veridicality" in Wikipedia, to see if we are talking about the same thing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veridicality

According to that article, a propositional operator F is veridical iff Fp -> p, otherwise F is nonveridical.

With that definition, "lo" is neither veridical nor nonveridical because it is not a propositional operator.

The sense in which I take "lo" to be veridical is that the predicate it uses as its input must be true of the referents of the _expression_ it returns as its output. "lo" takes a predicate as input and returns a referring _expression_ as output, a propositional operator takes propositions as input and returns a proposition as output. I'm not saying that the speaker of "lo" is asserting that the referents of "lo broda" are broda, rather they are taking that for granted.
 

I'd understood {lo plise cu plise} to be necessarily true, but you seem not to, yes?

It must be true, as long as it makes sense, i.e. as long as "lo plise" has referents. If "lo plise" doesn't have referents it's neither true nor false, although this can only happen very rarely because of the "don't think of an elephant" effect. Since the universe of discourse is something very flexible, just using an _expression_ like "lo plise" is usually enough to bring in at least one referent for "lo plise" into the UD. It's hard to say that even something like "square circles are square circles" is not true, because talking about square circles presupposes that there are square circles, and in that case they must be square circles, what else could they be? It's easier to accommodate our ontology so as to allow square circles in it (at least temporarily and until it becomes untenable) than to invoke a failure of reference. In any case, I would say that "lo plise cu plise" is necessarily not false.  

So {lo broda cu brodu} is not equivalent to {zo'e ge broda gi brodu}?

I would say they are not equivalent because that it brodas is in one case presupposed and in the other case asserted. 

If this is already covered somewhere else on wiki or in archives, just point me to it.

I don't think there is any concentrated full coverage anywhere.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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