Subject: Re: [lojban] A serious but ungeneralized new attempt on Q-kau

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 11:55:39 EDT

In a message dated 8/30/2001 8:44:31 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> "What I have for dinner depends on what's in the fridge"
> "What shirt I wear depends on where I'm going"
> 

I am not sure I understand, so much less agree with, the "explicit", or even 
the normal, versions in this list. But I want to focus on this last case, 
since it is pretty clearly ambiguous and I want to see whether I have sorted 
things out aright.
First there is a general claim about how meal planning is do, more or less. 
I'll get back to that. The second is about what for dinner today or what 
shirt I will wear today. In that case, it seems clear that it le meal/shirt 
depends on loi fridge content/le weather, with no indirect question games at 
all. However, the indirect question form turns up again behind this 
dependency, as a general rule that now gets applied. So, in one sense, the 
relative clause versions turn out to be instantiations of the indirect 
question versions. And that looks right: if the indirect question version 
involves a set of propositions (or whatevers -- see the extensions to at 
least {ka}) then the relative clause version brings the {makau} down to a 
single particular answer. 
So back to the indirect question version. Each indirect question is a set of 
answers, propositions that match the paradigm forms in meaning even if not in 
form. What then of "depends on"? It appears to mean a selection of 
conditional sentences taking (at least) a subset of the crossproduct of the 
two sets -- but quite a bit more, I think. "Depends on" says that there is 
an satisfied subset of this sort, such that if P is "What's in the fridge" 
set and Q is in the "What's for dinner" set then "If P the Q" may be in the 
set that makes up the dependency -- and will be if it is non-vacuously true. 
It is important to note that the connection here is "depends on", not "is 
determined by", so other factors may enter in -- what I had for lunch, what 
our guest cannot eat,...., and also does not require that what we eat be from 
what is in the fridge (if the answer about content is "Nothing," then the 
answer about dinner may be "canned beans" or "take-out" or "eat out" or...., 
as indeed it may always be if the contents don't suit). 
This leaves the question of how to say this. The gismu list is not very 
suggestive of where to start. Working with the way things change, which I 
thought a good idea a couple of weeks ago, now seems less advantageous than 
trying to tackle the issue head-on. The changes are in loi content and le 
meal, not in the general associations (though I suppose that the associations 
change some. too -- I may not go for dragon and phoenix every time I have the 
ingredients, even though the former drawbacks no longer apply -- like I just 
had it for lunch or yesterday's dinner).