Subject: Re: [lojban] How many?

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Sep 2000 16:57:50 GMT

la pijem cusku di'e

>We still need a way of talking about non-real things.

But we can talk about them. I just don't want to claim without
qualification that non-real fish are fish.

>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.],

Is it desirable? Is the set of all discussions then the same
as the universal set, since we could imagine anything to be
a discussion, and therefore everything is some type of discussion?
I don't think that's desirable at all.

>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").

So you would agree that everything is a member of the set of fish?

>I think it good to keep physical reality as a
>separate property.

It is a separate property, but it is part of what constitutes
being a fish. Things that lack that property can only be fish
in a very marginal sense. You need a strong contrary context
to override it.

>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.

But as pc said, how can you tell whether you're talking
about real world zasti or things that you imagine as zasti.
Are they not types of zasti as well? Why would non-real finpe
be more acceptable than non-real zasti?

co'o mi'e xorxes

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