Subject: Re: djuno debate (was: RE: [lojban] Random lojban questions/annoyances.)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 25 Mar 2001 14:49:34 EST

In a message dated 3/24/2001 4:21:26 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Personally, though, then as now, I would prefer djuno not to
> mean 'know'. I'd like it to mean 'believe' (specifically, for
> X djuno Y to mean "X believes X knows Y") and to differ from
> krici/jinvi in that if X djuno Y then Y is not necessarily true
> but X believes that any right-minded person should also djuno
> Y. Typically this would be because there is overwhelming 
> evidence that Y, or because Y is logically entailed by axioms
> or by premises already believed by everyone, and so on. This
> would capture the difference between English "I know that P"
> and "I believe that P": it would be "I know that P" that would
> be translated by "djuno"; that is, "djuno" is the epistemological
> state wrt P of someone who would say "I know that P".
> 
Though it pains me to toss over 2500 years of hard-slogging philosophical 
work, &'s non-suggestion about {djuno} makes a good deal of sense, certainly 
as an explication of what the present definition of {djuno} was meant to 
convey, with a small amount of contextual help. Those axioms or premises or 
evidence just are the epistemology and, if it is X's epistemology, then X 
presumably believes it and believes that every right-thinking person believes 
it and so on. How far this comes from saying that P is true in that 
epistemology, I am not sure (I suppose, overwhelming evidence could still be 
wrong, but not, presumably, entailment). I suspect that in enttering the 
state of {djuno} , X so modifies the epistemology that P is indeed true in it 
as well. Later evidence may make him revise the epistemology back a bit, to 
drop P, and maybe some of the evidence for it, but then it is a different 
epistemology. So, {jetnu} offers no special problems after all.