Subject: Re: [lojban] An approach to attitudinals

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 08 Jun 2001 20:52:59 -0400

At 12:19 AM 06/09/2001 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:
>It is clear that atitudinals are not used to make claims.
>If I say "ui" I am not claiming that I am happy, I am simply
>showing you that I am happy. A big smile might accomplish the
>same thing. They are not claims.
>
>But that in no way means that I can remove the attitudinals from
>a bridi and that what is left is something that I am asserting.
>Sometimes this is how it works, sometimes it isn't.
>
>For example, in {ui la djan pu klama le zarci} I am claiming that
>John went to the market, and I am expressing happiness about that
>fact. But in {a'o la djan pu klama le zarci} I am not claiming
>that John went to the market. I can't hope for something that
>I know is true, {a'o} requires that I don't know that the statement
>is true, and also that I don't know it to be false either. If the
>bridi is to be taken as a claim, it is not about the actual world
>but about the world as I want it to be, a world that has to be
>compatible with what I know of the real world. On the other hand,
>{mi pacna le nu la djan klama le zarci} is a claim about the real
>world.

This is the "possible worlds" concept that pycyn was talking about.

>{au} is more permissive than {a'o}. Again the statement can't be
>known to be true, you can't wish for something you already have!

It can, but then the emotive response overlaps with that of pleasure and/or 
satisfaction.

loi lojbo ca banro .au
Lojban is growing, and I want this to be the case.

Indeed for all the possible worlds where one can imagine using the negative 
scale value, you can also come up with a reason to use the positive, though 
again it may overlap other attitudinals.

>But in this case it _can_ be known to be false, because you can
>wish things were different than what they in fact are:
>{au la djan pu klama le zarci} "I wish John had gone to the market".
>In this case it is suggested (if not actually claimed) that John
>did not go to the market, for if I didn't know whether or not he
>went I could have used {a'o} instead of {au}. To make the actual
>claim I would have to say {oi la djan na pu klama le zarci}.

Again we go back to the possible worlds thinking. The problem with 
possible worlds is that our emotions are not logical, and attitudes 
shouldn't NEED to be analyzed for whether they are "logical" for the 
situation. I can use ".a'o" for "Lojban is presently growing as well, 
because I may be saying that it is growing now, but also anticipating a 
future where it continues to grow. The "ca" is not what inspires the 
".a'o", but rather the "banro".

>So, some attitudinals do not remove the assertiveness of the bridi
>which they adorn: ui, ua, ue, u'e, u'i, ia, ie, ii, oi, o'i, o'a
>are all in this category.

And my contention is that sometimes (though it might be rare), even these 
might render a possible world. With no tense specified, especially, these 
can invoke a sense of potentiality rather than actuality.

>Some attitudinals require that the speaker doesn't know the
>bridi to be true: a'o, au, ai, ei, e'o, e'u, e'e, e'a are all
>in this category. In these cases, the bridi is not a claim about
>the real world. It is rather a claim about the speaker's inernal
>world, and the speaker must necessarily not know that the claim
>be true of the real world.
>
>For some attitudinals, I am not quite sure about their meaning yet,
>so I can't tell which category they belong to.

Some are probably beyond classification.

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