Subject: Re: [lojban] How many?

From: Peter Moulder <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 6 Sep 2000 16:45:50 +1100 (EST)

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.