Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: possible worlds

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2001 22:52:37 EDT

In a message dated 6/21/2001 7:42:56 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> I suppose you're right. So now we're back where we were, because the 
> "possible
> worlds" cmavo can't be a UI - it doesn't have enough grammatical structure 
> that
> way.
> 
> It may have to be a xVV cmavo. (It feels icky to use xVV cmavo when there 
> are
> empty cmavo like {bi'a} and {ci'a} at our disposal, but oh well.) If so, I
> would suggest that it should be a tense.
> 

Oh, the grammar is not all that bad. We need, however, to decide what the 
critter is to do. As I have said, I think the "possible worlds" talk -- 
outside of technical logic -- is a pretty bad one, since it goes so far 
toward reducing all speech acts to describing/asserting. In that view, 
though, making moves to other worlds would be rather like a tense, except 
that the world would be described situationally only, never by displacement 
(what would be the metric of displacement after all -- or even the 
direction?) I think that the UIs work rather better: they describe the 
displacement and permit laying stress when that is useful (it's the change in 
my economic status, not a change in me that is important in {mi ricfu da'i}, 
say). Which of these words we will use ({da'i}, {va'o} in a different way, 
probably some others) and how they correlate with various brivla (I think 
{sruma} goes nicely with {da'i} despite the different sources), is going to 
depend upon what we find when we really start looking at the various kinds of 
acts that may be out there: telling a tale is different from doing a proof 
and that from contingency plannig or speculation about character or... . We 
need to find out what our resources are as well (what words can reasonably 
play a role here?)
As for your sentence, I think all you really needed to say was {ledo logji 
cmavo poi roroi mapti zoi <if, then> na da'inai roroi mapti zoi <if, then>} 
"What you call the logical connective that always matches "if, then" does not 
in fact always match "if, then":" the putative conditional doesn't work". 
Otherwise, I'd stick {se sruma} in.