Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: Rabbity Sand-Laugher

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 06 Jun 2001 02:34:43 -0400

At 10:49 PM 06/05/2001 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>In a message dated 6/5/2001 8:03:36 PM Central Daylight Time, [email-masked]
>writes:
>>In particular, even "ui" can be seen as a propositional attitude,
>>something like "It makes me happy that ..."
>
>In short, when we had a chance to get rid of an ambiguity in English (and at
>least SAE generally), we muffed it, keeping the whole shooting match.
>Actually, it is rather worse than that, since the distinction was made and
>preserved in Loglan

I don't think it is. There isn't enough attitudinal usage in TLI Loglan to 
know how "ui" really works.

But I think that there remains a THREE WAY distinction, with two of the 
three being usually semantically ambiguous in Lojban (I think some of the 
discursives actually disambiguate between world-creation and propositional 
expression - certainly the non-dai observatives are propositional and 
especially the observative of assertion).

I don't think that "ui" "It makes me happy that" is quite the same as "mi 
gleki lenu ...". The latter is tenseless (and hence could be other than a 
present emotion, whereas "ui" always is taken at the point of expression), 
and is truth conditional with regards to the happiness and not the thing 
one is happy about.

>-- though people regularly got it wrong and had to be
>corrected. And, of course, it is a distinction made around about page 15 in
>a good logic book. I think "waffle" is overgenerous and I suggest that we
>have again fallen for the lowest common denominator.

I don't think so. I think we have so many possibilities that have yet to 
be explored with the attitudinals, and no one will discover there are 
problems until they have to deal with misunderstandings like this one. The 
common denominator will be raised when more people have explored the 
alternatives.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org