Subject: RECORD: subjunctive

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2000 05:01:33 EDT

This turns out to be mainly about contrary-to-fact conditionals,
e.g., "If I had a million rupnu, I would be rich." The other major
use of subjunctive forms in English, indirect discourse of various
sorts, is handled nicely by leNU and careful choice of brivla. And it
may be that CTF is as well. What is immediately clear is that
1) anai in its various forms is no help, since, when the protasis (if-
clause) is false, as it is assumed to be here, the whole sentence is
automatically true, for anai is the material conditional so handy for
logicians since the -3rd century, but still read as "if".
2) tense markers in Lojban will probably not help, however much
English subjunctives look like they belong with tenses. Lojban
tenses really are just about the relative order of events in time and
maybe even in linear time. Even if time is allowed to branch,
reconstructing English subjunctives-as-tense in Lojban tenses need
not get to the right places (if no past time has a future in which I
have a million rupnu, then the CTF is again vacuously true). The
generality of unmarked Lojban tenses does not help, sinc they also
allow the vacuous fulfillment.
3) The move to possible worlds runs into the usual problem with
this bit of technical smoke-and-mirrors when applied to real cases:
if there are no possible worlds appropriately similar to this one in
which I have a million rupnu, then the claim is again vacuously true;
if there are possible worlds in which I have a million rupnu, are they
as a result so different from this one as to make it unreasonable to
think they are about the real (in this world) me. Or, worse, is it that
the appropriate similarlities are so defined as to make the claim a
tautology (since to have mean have a million requires also that I be
put into the rich category)? And, of course, there are many
possible worlds where I have a million rupnu and am not rich (the
last days of the Weimar Republic or the US in the 1780s, for
example), where everyone had a million or so but a pound of butter
cost a billion. The "if I were Rothschild..." kind of CTFs make the
problems of specifying possible worlds particularly obvious.

The solution seems to be to ignore problem 3, as we usually do
anyhow, and go with imaginary conditions, assuming virtually
everything else (in particular my history and the economic facts of
the world) remain the same and so use expressions like va'o (da'i)
and leNU for the protasis. (The parenthesis here reflects the
uncertainty whether x1 of vanbi, the source of va'o has to be an
event that obtains or might be hypothetical. Since events exist even
when they do not obtain, the consensus seems to be that this one
can be hypothetical, leaving the obtaining one for tcini, which lacks
a tag, as would be expected for a less useful notion.) Alternatively,
one could use some appropriate eventconnector: causes, entails,
necessitates, and the like between leNUs.

This discussion prepposes that the claim is meant fairly literally,
really about me and my million. It might, of course, be an indirect
way to talk about a general situation, "Anyone with a million
dollars is rich" In this case, it should be spelled out in this way, ro
da.... Other kinds of implied generalizations might best be dealt
with by giving the laws or lawlike conditions involved; causes and
so on.

Something similar might also work with genuinely singular CTFs,
matters of character (If he had been there, he would have saved
her), or commitment (If I were President, I would stand up to the
Russkies) and so on.

It was also suggested that translating CTFs required flagging the protasis as 
unlikely/false. 
While this did not obviously carry the day, some ways to do it efficiently 
were suggested.