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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Mar 2001 17:08:27 +0100

pc:
#> 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 init 
#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.

I should add that thanks to pc & John I now understand DJUNO better, &
I don't think there's a conflict between what I said above and the actual
meaning of DJUNO. If I say "mi djuno ko'a (fo zo'e)", I'm essentially claiming
that you can only dispute ko'a if you argue that the ve djuno is invalid.

This would contrast with KRICI, where if I say "mi krici ko'a" I am allowing that
you may arbitrarily and without reason not krici ko'a, and with JINVI, where
if I say "my jinvi ko'a" I am allowing that you might not jinvi ko'a, but if you
don't then it is susceptible to quasirational discussion in which we eventially
out to *converge* on a se jinvi..

Sorry for adding 4 more messages to this thread! I'll shut up now & go home.

--And.