Subject: Re: [lojban] tautologies

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 9 Feb 2002 16:06:11 EST

In a message dated 2/9/2002 11:09:53 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> I don't remember what you thought of:
> 
> mi ta te vecnu ije makau ta jdima
> I buy it, whatever be its price.
> 

I hated it, for all the reasons that I dislike this one -- a free floating 
indirect question doesn't make any sense at all and doesn't have a truth 
value, so can't be atached truth functionally.

<Which naturally leads to:

mi ta te vecnu ije xukau ta kargu
I buy it, whetherever it be expensive.

You might want to add some kind of causality connector instead
of a simple {ije}, but the second sentence is still a tautology.>

No -- as I said then -- the second sentence is which is is true of P and ~P, 
neitehr of which is typically a tautology -- that is it is the answer to the 
question (if it has any truth value at all).

<In English you can say tautological things like "it costs whatever
it costs", which one could lojbanize as "ta se jdima makau", but
it is hard to find a tautology operator to do a complete
proposition>

A tautology is a single sentence which is true regardless. {ta se jdima 
makau} , if meaningful at all, is always true but is a different sentence on 
different occasions, so not a tautology. "It costs whatever it costs" is 
just {ta se jdima lo jdima be ta}, which is a tautology. I still suspect a 
large number of indirect questions, so called, are relatives or, as here, 
descriptions. As I said, indirect questions are questions in indirect 
discourse and make little sense elsewhere -- English to the contrary 
notwithstanding (in a word, this pursuit looks to be bloated malglicotude).