Subject: Re: [lojban] "knowledge as to who saw who" readings

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 11 Oct 2001 20:50:09 EDT

In a message dated 10/11/2001 8:38:20 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Okay. So intensional descriptions of beliefs are independent of propositional
> form. But we do still need a way to describe beliefs when we know their
> truthconditions but not their intensional form.
> 

Well, the problem is that there truth conditions don't enter in to the issue 
when we are dealing with beliefs, the intension determines the extension, to 
be sure, but the converse does not hold nor play any role. It is pretty 
clear that knowing truth conditions will never be adequate for doing anything 
inside intensional contexts, and all your proposals seem to be trying to use 
truth conditions for just that. 

<I probably failed to properly execute my intention (& can't locate my
original message to see where I went wrong), which was that lo 
-extension-member-claim (etc.) should be defined as proposition that
is truthconditionally equivalent to tu'odu'u da cmima tu'o -extension
be tu'odu'u ce'u viska ce'u, etc. The intention, then, is that given
"la djon jinvi/djuno lo -extension-member-claim be tu'odu'u ce'u 
viska ce'u", we know the truthconditions of John's belief but not
its intensional form. Is that clear?

I likened it to your set-of-answers approach because it too does not
specify the intensional form of answers.>

But your approach still does not get over the extension-intension gap. You 
just know extensional equivalence and that says nought about intensional 
anything (well, if they are not extensionally equivalent, they are not 
intensionally either). The set of answers apporach, since it deals only with 
answers, can come close to taking each answer as intensionally equivalent to 
some model answer on the basis of an extensional equivalence. But that still 
doesn't completely solve the intension problem, since there will be model 
answers which are extensionally equivalent but not intensionally so and so 
can't be intersubstituted: correct descriptions and names, for example.

<Ragarding Scenario
3, you offered:

#SA3b. la djon djuno tu'odu'u ri djuno ro jetnu du'u makau viska makau

but I think you will agree that there is an intensional (and probably
also truthconditional) difference between John knowing that nobody but
Bill went, and, on the other hand, John knowing that for every
goer he knows that they went. So SA3 is still not satisfactory.>

The question clearly asks only for the latter and the claim that it asks for 
more is dubious, Griceanly. If he gives the complete list and stops, we give 
him full marks, whether or not he goes on wiht "and nobody else." The "and 
nobody else" is as separate a piece of knowledge as is the individual listed 
items and so needs a separate clause (another dubious aspect of the 
"extension claim" theory).