Subject: Re: [lojban] utterances; UI

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 15:36:33 EST

In a message dated 2/2/2002 1:03:43 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> So a smoke signal can have a truth value, but a word that's both written
> and spoken doesn't?
> 

Yup. The smoke signal is code for some message -- some declarative sentence. 
As such it gets a truth value derivatively from the sentence it encodes 
(unless there is a whole smoke langauge as there is for drums and ASL signs, 
it which case it IS a sentence, not merely a code for one). Most words, 
however, don't have a truth value, which belong only to sentences (or 
propositions -- lets not get into that one). In sentences, some words 
contribute to the truth value of the whole by being functional parts of the 
description whose holding makes the sentence true; others remove the sentence 
from being a description of an event taken as holding and convert it into 
some other sort of sentence than an informative one (constative) and thus 
remove it from the area of truth values, some words in a sentence do not 
affect its truth value at all. UI tend very much to be in the last two 
categories, {ui} itself in the last -- truth-value irrelevant -- group.
Smoke, btw, without a language or an encoding, does not have a truth value, 
even though seeing it is a good reason for claiming that there is fire at the 
point where the smoke is: it is a sign, though not a symbol nor a signal.