Subject: Re: [lojban] Not talking about imaginary worlds

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2001 10:48:30 EDT

In a message dated 7/2/2001 7:12:29 PM Central Daylight Time, [email-masked] 
writes:

> by saying "suppose X" you walk into a room with the specific property that X 
> is always true within it, so you can talk treating X as a fact, no matter 
> if 
> it it true in the "physical" world.
> 
> the advantange of my approach is that it is easily applied recursively, and 
> that from the perspective of any specific universe it is itself "real" and 
> all derived ones are speculative, when you enter a derived universe it in 
> 

Well, if that helps you comprehend the situation then well and good. But I 
think it important to distinguish between fiction and speculation. In 
fiction, once you have passed into the X room, there are no restrictions on 
what room you can go to next and settle into --a fictor is is limited only by 
what he chooses to do. But speculation always comes back to the base world 
and so the further doors are limited by what is left of this world. If you 
want to speculate about what would happen if Socrates were a 19th century 
Irish washer-woman, you are restricted by the character of Socrates (whatever 
it is that you carry over) and what is reasonably clear about 19th century 
Irish washer-women -- this is part of the accessibility relation between 
worlds in a speculative modality. Using the whole structure of possible 
worlds for speculation then seems excessive -- and probably misleading.