Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: I like chocolate

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2002 22:30:23 EDT

In a message dated 8/20/2002 7:10:19 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> Here {le nu mi citka le vi cakla} refers to the present event
> of my eating this chocolate. I can refer to that very same
> event with another description: {le nu mi citka lo cakla}.
> This descriprtion is more vague, but still describes the
> present event. Now, I could also say, based only on the fact
> that I like eating this chocolate, that:
> 
>>
Well, yes and no. It refers directly to something in my world, which is 
correlated to something in the external world. It may or may not be very 
similar: a delusional person could like this event -- and believe himself 
participating in it -- whether or not he was eating or what he was eating was 
chocolate (and this has nothing to do with the non-veridicality of {le}, only 
with the loose connnection between ideational worlds and this one, which is 
what intensional contexts like {nu} bring into play). I think the point you 
are striving to make applies nicely to {levi cakla zo'u mi nelci le nu mi 
citka cy} or some such thing, but that is precisely because the mention of 
the chocolate is outside the intensional context and so bound to this world.

<<

mi nelci lo nu mi citka lo cakla
There is at least one event in which some chocolate
is eaten by me that I like.

That's all that says. There may very well be more events, but
I'm not saying anything about that. The events in which some
chocolate is eaten by me may even be imaginary. But in
any case I am referring to the events in which some chocolate
is eaten by me extensionally, on a one by one basis. When I
say in English "I like eating chocolate", I don't mean to refer
extensionally to the events in which I eat chocolate.
{mi nelci lo nu citka lo cakla} does not say that I like
eating chocolates as a rule.

I'm not clear where the first part of this fits in nor what exactly 
"[referring to?] the event in which some chocolate is eaten by me 
extensionally" means. Events are intensional, but they occur in real classes, 
so we can pick them out extensionally (Lojban isn't even obviously odd about 
this). But at least we agree that the Lojban sentence as given is not "as a 
rule."

<<
la pycyn cusku di'e

>An the other hand, we
>can assume -- and I think {lo} implicates this -- that he has actually been
>in a few of these events at least and enjoyed them, so the existential
>conditions are met.

I don't see why we can assume that.
Well, {lo} is just an existential quantifier in a portable disguise.

<<
>And may yet be met by future case -- or maybe not. What
>else may be implied is probably covered by some tense-like critter: {ta'e} 
>or
>{so'eroi} spring to mind.

Whatever {ta'e} or {so'eroi} provide, they will provide as
well for {mi nelci lo cakla}, so this is not particular to {lo nu}:

mi ta'e nelci lo nu mi citka lo cakla
Habitually it is the case that there is some eating of
chocolate that I like.

mi ta'e nelci lo cakla
Habitually it is the case that there is some chocolate
that I like.

Both are equally unsatisfactory, since what I want to claim
is not about habitually there being instances of chocolate
or instances (real or imaginary) of eating. Indeed my liking
of chocolate may be a permanent thing rather than habitual.

OK then, {roroi}. I have lost the thread of the objection here, which seemed 
to me to be that {lo} was not appropriate because it introduced quantifiers 
over things like events, which there could not be since events are 
intensional. Here are quantfiers
over events which remain intensional. What is habituaol, etc. is not there 
being events but my liking some of the events (there are always events of any 
sort you care to come up with).

<<
To make the parallel even clearer, we can use {nunmibycaklycitka}
instead of {nu mi citka lo cakla}:

mi nelci lo nunmibycaklycitka
There is some eating-of-chocolate-by-me that I like.
This doesn't make anything clearer, that I can see. Sure, we can do that -- 
but then when we come to explain what it means, what will we say if not 
something like {mi nelci lo nu mi citka lo cakla}? Or something like it in 
English or whatever.

<<
>Facts, being propositions, are as quantifiable as things or events. In
>Lojban, all of then exist, whether or not they obtain.

I'm not sure what that means. I think the proper way to use
{du'u} should be as {tu'o du'u}, with no quantifier.
What do these mean:

la djak djuno pa du'u la djil sipna
la djak djuno re du'u la djil sipna
la djak djuno ro du'u la djil sipna

Does any of them make any sense? What are the members of
{lo'i du'u la djil sipna}?>>

I am at a loss to see the advantage of {tu'o}, "a non-specific, elliptical 
number" over {lo}, which amounts to an unspecified number. Neither of them 
lacks a quantifier, and both have unspecific ones. 
The members of lo'i du'u la djil sipna are all the propositions that in fact 
amount to claims that Jill sleeps. Since they are intensional, the 
identities that in fact apply -- such as that Jill is Jack's sister and that 
sleeping is non-traumatic temporary loss of consciousness -- do not reduce 
them to a single item. So, {la djak djuno le pa du'u la djil sipna} and {la 
djak djuno le pa du'u ledy mensi cu sipna} are two different claims that 
belong to the same class, lo'i du'u la djil sipna (or lo'i le mensi be la 
djak sipna). So, Jack probably does know two of them, probably more but 
almost certainly not all. All the Lojban srntences are false, then, but for 
different reasons -- the first two give Jack too few propositions he knows, 
the last one too many.