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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2001 14:26:27 EDT

In a message dated 10/12/2001 12:15:29 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> It seems to me that {ce'u} ought to be analysable as an unevaluated
> {ma kau}, btw.
> 

I think there will be scope problems here. What does "unevaluated" mean in 
this context? As bound variables, they are all inherently unevaluated.

<I'm not sure what you mean by "adequate"; certainly we can't do
without having a way to represent intensional forms of beliefs,
but at the same time I think we can't do without having a way
to represent extensional forms of beliefs, and I don't readily
see the snag: what's wrong with saying "the truth conditions of
p are blahblahblah and John believes p"?>

OK, and that will be helpful for deciding whether John's belief is true or 
not, but does nothing to help the problem -- which I thouhgt was the one you 
were on -- of connecting what John believes with some other propositions that 
you can work on more easily. For this task, no amount of truth-condition 
information will complete the task, even if, ala xorxes, you know that both 
propositions are answers to the question.

<> 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).  

I agree (I think -- I can't ever be sure we understand one
another right) that my approach says nought about intensional
anything. But I don't see that as a problem.>

Then I guess I don't understand what you are trying to do. Most of what I 
have seen from you looked to be trying to rewrite what John believes in terms 
of the extension of some property and John's beliefs about that extension, 
based on the extensional eqquivalence between the proposition which John 
believes and a certain proposition about the extension of the property. But 
those rewrites are not generally legitimate and in the cases given clearly 
are not.

<I don't understand everything you say, but I had taken it as one of
the strengths of the xorxesian set-of-answers approach that it isn't
intensional (or so I understood).>

I don't know quite what "xorxes' system is not intensional" means. He has a 
set of answers better, a property "is an answer to..." and a number of 
propositions that meet that property), within that set the answers can be 
pretty much reduced to the model answers (just like the question with the kau 
words replaced) on extensional grounds, but the various answers, even all the 
true model ones, are still intensionally distinct.

<So, to reply to what you say, I think the "and nobody else" is
implied by an answer that is understood to be exhaustive.>

That claim is vague enough to avoid any objection I could think of. On the 
other hand, taken in its simplest sense, it is often false. The eharer may 
take the speaker's stopping for a exhaustive completion, the speaker may only 
intend an exhausted run out of patient or memory. I would like a "and nobody 
else" explicit before I bet even the chicken coop.