Subject: Re: [lojban] krici (was: djuno [was: random lojban annoyance

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2001 22:21:56 EST

In a message dated 3/19/2001 5:29:52 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> <These are called assumptions.>
> 
Not in English nor (under {sruma}) in Lojban.
Damn. We're back on different pages. 

Remember that these beliefs held invulnerable for the moment are, in their 
own right, based on other evidence and so on. So, they are not merely 
assumptions for argument; they are rather postulates, which need not be 
discharged, as assumption must be (indirect proof of one sort or another) or 
prejudice the conclusion/claim. They cannot in this argument be rejected, as 
an assumption can be. 
They are, however, beliefs that the person holds (typically, as you note, on 
the basis of some evidence -- which cannot now be the issue) and which s/he 
then uses as evidence for the beliefs under attack. 

I think we are talking slightly at cross-purposes here. The evidence for the 
truth of the claim that I am seeing a yellow patch is my seeing a yellow 
patch, but what is the evidence for my seeing a yellow patch, which is a 
du'u, something that I believe, but for which no evidence other than itself 
is possible (the way the usual story goes). 
"Evidence" as it is used in these epistemological uses is a logical concept, 
propositions that support another proposition, what they are evidence for. 
No experience can be that sort of evidence, since no experience is a 
paroposition (whatever that is). But an experience can be a *cause* of 
believing a proposition, one for which there is no evidence at all. (I know 
that this is being fussy about language, and that people -- including 
philosophers -- would call the experience evidence, but to do so leads to the 
double problem of an impossible logic and one or another kind of problems 
with evidence -- infintie regress or contradiction). (It also turns out, for 
the sake of those who don't like objective facts, etc., that an experience is 
never enough by itself to cause a belief, there has to be another belief 
involved as well, an interpretation of the experience -- and that other 
belief is subject to challenge, so that causation cannot literally be taken 
as a species of evidence.)