Subject: Re: [lojban] tautologies

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2002 16:12:18

la pycyn cusku di'e

>Well, as a fundamentalist in Lojban, I point out thaat, although {kau} is
>grammatical outside of subordinate clauses, it is meaningless since it is 
>the
>mark of an indirect question and that is its only function.

Ok. I on the other hand prefer to find meaning in any grammatical
sentence whenever I can.

><Would you agree that {mi ta te vecnu ije da'au
>ta kargu} is equivalent to {mi ta te vecnu iju ta kargu}?>
>
>No. One conjoins the significant sentence with a truth, the other simply
>ignores the second sentence, which might be false. They would be truth
>functionally the same, but not equivalent in any interesting way.

Hmmm... So you can't combine a unary operator with a binary
operator to get another binary operator. Would you say that
binary-unary combination {ije naku} is also not equivalent in
any interesting way to the binary {ijenai}? (They are truth
functionally the same.)

><{ta se jdima lo jdima be ta} is as much a different sentence on
>different occasions as {ta se jdima makau}.>
>
>Not so. {ta se jdima lo jdima be ta} is always the same sentence, even
>though what the price is changes with circumstances. But {ta se jdima 
>makau}
>is, generalizing from most of the theories about indirect questions, 
>whatever
>of the set of answers to the question happpens to be true: so, as the price
>changes, so does the sentence -- not just the referent, but the expression
>itself.

I don't understand. What gets pronounced is the same in different
occasions, so you don't mean that. The situation described is
different for both in different occasions, so you don't mean that
either. I don't see what it is that remains the same for the case
of {ta} but changes for {makau}.

><And I don't agree that {ta se jdima lo jdima be ta} means "it costs
>whatever it costs". I think it is equivalent to {ta se jdima da},
>"it costs something", which may be false.>
>
>The only way it can be false is of
>something which has no price, but then "It costs whatever it costs" would 
>be
>false as well, since these things have no cost at all. There are, of 
>course,
>no such things (and I think that is a necessary truth too).

I think that {makau} allows for the {noda} case. If you don't
agree that some things can't have a price, it doesn't matter,
change the predicate. {mi klama makau} does not exclude the
possibility that {mi klama noda}, whereas {mi klama lo se
klama be mi} requires that {mi klama da}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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