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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 16 Sep 2002 16:56:34 +0100

xorxes:
#la pycyn cusku di'e
#[lo pixra be lo'e sincrboa]
#>Sorry, I thought you meant an accurate picture of a generic boa, because,
#>once you get away from that, it gets hard to keep up the claim that it isa
#>pictue of a generic boa rather than something else that it is an accurate
#>picture of.
#
#Right. I don't want to claim that there is anything that it is
#a picture of. I don't want to make the claim: {da poi ... zo'u
#ta pixra da}. 

Why exactly don't you want to make that claim? There's certainly
a sense in which the picture could depict a particular boa that
even if it doesn't exist in this world, exists in another world (that
the picture is a window onto). Here I see no problem with {da},
as long as there is appropriate use of {ka'e} or {su'o mu'ei} or
suchlike. 

This is the sort of situation that would arise in describing a picture
of Sherlock: I don't think we should be forced to say {pixra
lo'e -detective} -- {pixra le ka'e -detective} (or 
le su'o mu'ei -detective} is much better.

But there's another sense of "picture of a" not so happily covered
by the above alternative. For example, "on the taskbar button on
my email software there is a picture of a diskette" -- here I certainly
don't want to say that there is a diskette that exists in some worlds
that may or may not include this one, and that is depicted by the
taskbar button. Rather, I mean something like the pattern
on the taskbar button has the visual aspects of the property of 
diskettehood. Something like {ta ckaji zei pixra tu'o du'u ce'u
-diskette}, with {ckaji zei pixra} defined as "has visual aspects
of property x2". This is much more like the case you've been
talking about, but I am yet to be persuaded that it calls for
{lo'e}.

--And.