From reiter@netspace.net.au Tue Sep 05 22:45:54 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 3908 invoked from network); 6 Sep 2000 05:45:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 6 Sep 2000 05:45:54 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO cirrus.netspace.net.au) (203.10.110.75) by mta2 with SMTP; 6 Sep 2000 05:45:52 -0000 Received: from aurora (aurora.netspace.net.au [203.10.110.112]) by cirrus.netspace.net.au (Postfix) with SMTP id 92BEF7E9337; Wed, 6 Sep 2000 16:45:50 +1100 (EST) Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 16:45:50 +1100 (EST) X-Sender: reiter@aurora To: Jorge Llambias Cc: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] How many? In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Peter Moulder On Tue, 5 Sep 2000, Jorge Llambias wrote: > >Incidentally, I think that `xy. finpe' does not necessarily imply that > >x physically exists in the world; otherwise there would be no way of > >talking about non-real fish > > But non-real fish aren't really fish. "You're a fish." "No, I'm not!" > "Yes you are, I just pictured you as a fish, so you're an imaginary > fish. Furthemore, you're a fish of species Toyota." "But Toyota is > not a fish species!" "Yes, I just imagined that it is, so it is an > imaginary fish species." So you would have to accept things like > {do finpe la toiotas} as true statements. Anything and everything > would be fish. We still need a way of talking about non-real things. To resolve the above discussion [Note: the discussion did not actually take place, so is it really a discussion? It would be nice to say that a "supposed discussion" and a "hypothetical discussion" are each types of discussion, meaning subsets of the set of all discussions. However, it is only desirable rather than absolutely necessary.], we could either say that what was imagined is not Fred, or if it is Fred then we could say that imagination is part of the tense information (e.g. "do finpe bu'u da .ije da naku zasti"). Does that seem reasonable? I think it good to keep physical reality as a separate property. Saying `xy. finpe je zasti' or `xy. ge finpe ginai zasti' seems to me the clearest way of saying whether or not X is a physical world fish. co'o mi'e pijem.