Subject: Re: [lojban] Set of answers encore

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2001 03:53:17

la pycyn cusku di'e

>Suppose that {brode} and {brode} refer to exactly the ame
>things in fact, "has a heart" and "has a liver," say (I'm sure la pier will
>tell me this examples is hopelessly out of date and it probably is, but
>suppose). The {ko'a broda} and {ko'a brode} will be true or fasle together
>for every referent of {ko'a}. That means that le du'u koa broda} and {le
>du'u ko'a brode} always have the same truth value, for a given referent of
>{ko'a}. And so theya re equivalent and interchangeable in any context where
>only the truth value matters.

Well, yes, but is there any context at all where only the truth value
matters? I can't think of any.

>But there are contexts where the truth value
>is not all that matters: {mi jinvi...} for example. There you cannot
>exchange items with the same truth value and be sure to keep the truth 
>value
>of the whole the same.

But is there any case at all in which you can?

>Why not? The standard answer is that in those
>contexts (intensional contexts) the referent of the expression {le du'u 
>ko'a
>broda} is no longer the basic referent, its truth value,

I guess this is the basis of our disagreement. I don't think
that {le du'u ko'a broda} ever has a truth value as its referent.
It has a proposition (or something like that) as a referent.

>but its regular
>sense -- roughly the rule by which one determines its truth value in a 
>given
>world. Clearly, looking for a heart (pump in the blood system) is 
>different
>from looking for a liver (filter in the blood system),

But heart and liver don't have the same referent. You should
compare looking for one with a heart and looking for one with
a liver. Which would be the same if the be-hearted are the
be-livered (using the transparent sense of 'looking for').
'Being next to one with a heart' would be the same as 'being next
to one with a liver'.

>so the rules are
>different and thus the two expressions are no longer interchangeable. The
>reason for this rule is that, without it, you get absurdities like moving
>from "Jim believes that 2+2 =4," to "Jim believes that Casaubon showed the
>Smargdarine Tables were a third century pseudograph" on the grounds that 
>they
>are both true.

Hopefully nobody wants to do that.

>The rule slows the errors down quite a bit. It is debatable
>whether this means that {du'u ko'a broda} has a different extension from
>{du'u ko'a brode} or whether it means that in some cases it is not the
>extension but the intension that counts (I find the latter easier to deal
>with).

I the former. I don't like what the intensional contexts view
does in Lojban to simple predications like "I'm looking for my
umbrella".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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