Subject: Re: [lojban] Set of answers encore

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 10:02:14 EDT

In a message dated 10/1/2001 10:55:00 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

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

Well, one of the joys of logic is that any context defined simply by truth 
functional connectives (and quantifiers) is such. Now, in Lojban that covers 
a lot of ground, so most contexts will be do. The failures come because we 
covertly smuggle in (in the boring interest of having conversations amount to 
more than exercises in tautology) a mass of hidden intensional contexts, 
mainly having to do with "information." So, in fact, taking that information 
into account, athere are not a lot of places where you can make the exchange. 
But that does complicte matters a little more than the present question 
requires.

<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'.>
Yes, I shortcut a bit here -- going directly to how you would find out 
whether something was a being with a [whichever], since the point was about 
the rule for doing that. The point being that the senses are different since 
the rule tells to look for markedly different things.

<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.>

This is an extreme case to make a point. People do this sort of thing all 
the time, with disastrous results. That is why the rule is needed. See the 
old Orcutt (sp?) disputes. 

<>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".>

Hopefully, whichever view you want to hold, Lojban will do the same thing 
with this case and all others like it. Otherwise, wew will find ourselves 
claiming the existence of things that are only figments of overwrought (or 
underwrouhgt, come to that) imaginations -- the beauty who kissed me in my 
dream, for example. Just one of the things a logical language should prevent 
(on one common view of what being a logical language means).