Subject: Re: [lojban] Set of answers encore

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 17:47:34 EDT

In a message dated 9/25/2001 12:02:12 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> First
> off I want to know how to render the two readings of "John knows/believes 
> that
> Bill is not king of France" -- the intensional reading (which is the 
> current Lojban
> one) and the extensional reading, where John's beliefs are such that were 
> they
> true, Bill would not be king of France.
> 

Oh ho! (what is Lojban for "taxicab rejoinder," ?"l'esprit de l'escalier"? or 
some such).
I now see the point. John has never considered the question whether Bill is 
the king of France let alone formulated the belief that he is not. So, on 
the intensional view -- what I take the lojban {la djan jinvi le du'u ...} to 
mean, it is false that John believes/opines this (though this might make an 
interesting case to rpovide some separation between these two other than just 
the evidentiary one). On the other hand, John may well have beliefs that 
entail that Bill is not the king of France and the entailment may be one that 
John could work out easily -- even unconsciously -- were he to direct his 
attention to the matter. So there is a sense in which John does already 
believe that Bill is not the king of France (he believes, for example, that 
France does not have a king). 
I don't see exactly how this is an intensional-extensional problem; it seems 
to be more a problem about how to say the latter case -- something like 
{ka'e} or some stronger for: "doesn't but should to be consistent and 
complete." I don't think there is directly a sense of "believe" or "opine" 
or {krici/jinvi} that directly allows the claim that he does belive this to 
be true. But, again, this is not intensional-extension, since there is no 
claim to the effect that Bill is not the king of France such that John 
believes it either.