Subject: Re: [lojban] translation challenge: "If today is Monday..."

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Oct 2001 14:37:21 +0100

John:
#In English, "today" and "tomorrow" are normally token-reflexive, then,
#but in this sentence are used in the senses "a day" and "the successor
#of that day".

Jorge:
#The only way to solve it is to make explicit the universal
#quantification that "if" hides in English. You can quantify
#over all possible worlds (ro mu'ei), then, since there will
#always be one in which today is Monday, that will be enough to
#make the second sentence always false. (You have to limit
#possible worlds to those in which Tuesdays always follow
#Mondays in order for the first one to be true.) Or you can
#do as John did and quantify over all days. I think this is
#what goes on in English, "today" really stands for "each day",
#in the same way that "you" stands for "each person" in generic
#statements like "if you put your hands on the fire, you burn
#yourself". That really means "for every person x, if x puts
#x's hands on the fire, x burns x-self".
#
#For every "today" x, if x is Monday, then "the tomorrow" of x
#is Tuesday. TRUE
#
#For every "today" x, if x is Monday, then "the tomorrow" of x
#is Wednesday. FALSE

This is, in fact, what I said to McCawley when he came out with
the examples in question. His response was "But the sentences
*say* _today_, and _today_ means 'today'; it's only the _if_
that makes it seem as though it means something else". And I
agree with him.

We can ditch the deictics, though. If they're a redherring:

A. "If Jorge had been born in Warsaw, he'd be a British citizen"
= false

B. "Jorge is british or not born in Warsaw"
= true

C. we could change A to:
"Everyone is british or not born in Warsaw"
= false

but A and C are not equivalent, and we may be wishing to make
a claim only about Jorge, not about everyone. So quanifying
across possible worlds is not always avoidable.

--And.