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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2





On Wed, Oct 8, 2014 at 4:40 AM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
Jorge Llambías, On 07/10/2014 21:59:

I take "lo broda" to be a referring _expression_, not a claim, and
therefore the veridicality of its description can only be
presupposed. I'm not sure what other kind of rationale there might
be.

If {lo broda cu brodu} were equivalent to {zo'e ge broda gi brodu}, you could still say {lo broda} was a referring _expression_ by virtue of the {zo'e} it is equivalent to. Referentiality needn't entail presupposition of the description. As rationales, I thought you might be arguing that it's better to have different ways to express different meanings rather than merely different ways to express the same meaning; or maybe you had discovered logical pitfalls with a nonpresuppositional version of {lo}.

I don't object to having different ways to express the same meaning (quite the opposite, I think it's generally a good thing to find those equivalences). I do think the nonpresuppositional version fails to capture what I take "lo" to mean by introducing a claim that is not there.

 
Since "lo" is marked neither as definite/indefinite nor as
specific/generic, it is useful for identification of its referents
that it is at least veridical, This also allows maintaining the
original definition of "lo", prior to CLL: "veridical descriptor: the
one(s) that really is(are) ..."

What do you mean by 'identification'? The speaker knows what the referent is, and doesn't need to identify it to themself; and the referents aren't necessarily identifiable to the addressee.

Is "understanding" better than "identification"? 
 
Yes, the usual paraphrase for "lo broda" is "zo'e noi ke'a broda",
 which changes the presupposition into a side-claim, which is as close
as we could make it.

Far better to introduce an experimental cmavo for presupposition than to put about an incorrect paraphrase.

It would be a cmavo with very limited use though, mostly just in linguistic discussions rather than ordinary discourse. Maybe it can be covered with a sei-clause, once we figure out exacly how these clauses work.

 
But even with that paraphase "lo broda cu brodu"
is not equivalent to "zo'e ge broda gi brodu", because "naku lo broda
cu brodu" = "naku zo'e noi broda cu brodu" = "zo'e na broda .i ta'o
ri brodu" is not equivalent to "naku zo'e ge broda gi brodu" = "zo'e
ga na broda gi na brodu".

It might be -- coherently -- that "lo broda cu brodu" = "zo'e ge broda gi brodu", while "na ku lo broda cu brodu" = "zo'e ge broda gi na ku brodu", which is what I'd had in mind. That is, the "lo broda cu brodu" = "zo'e ge broda gi brodu" equivalence is not a rule for exchanging word-strings but rather for deriving more basic logical forms from less basic ones.

I think the sentence "zo'e noi broda cu brodu" and the sentence "zo'e ge broda gi brodu" don't express the same proposition, because the result of negating each of them results in sentences that express different propositions. Given a referent for "zo'e", the second sentence could express a false proposition while the first sentence expresses a true proposition along with a false side-proposition.

This reminds me that, if I recall correctly, we had different views when working on Xorban on whether it makes sense for two sentences with different illocutionary force to be logically connected. For me logical connection only applies to bare propositions, and not to propositions-in-use.
 
mu'o mi'e xorxes

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