Subject: RE: [lojban] Tentative summary on Attitudinals

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 6 Jul 2001 02:26:10 +0100

pc:
> In a message dated 7/2/2001 7:50:01 AM Central Daylight Time,
> [email-masked] writes:
[AR:]
> . For example, although "I am happy
> that P" entails P, ".ui P" means "P makes me happy" or "I'm happy, thanks to
> P", where P is not necessarily the case. Something like ".ui ju'a P" would
> mean "I'm happy, thanks to P being the case". Note that I'm not denying that
> "a'o P" should mean "Hopefully, P" (as opposed to "P makes me hopeful",
> though
> I gather from your summary that a'o attached in the appropriate place might
> mean that).

[PC:]
> I am not sure that I agree about the interpretation of {ui p}: I take the
> {ui} to be an imediate response to the present p, not a generalization or
> other form of projection, and I take that as being relatively clear in the
> book. Now, inserting the {ui} somewhere inside or at the end of p has been
> suggested as a way changing this force to something like what you suggest
> (among other things) but that is still in the proposal stage.

I don't know what you mean by "the present p".

The key point I wanted to make is that "p" is simply a proposition/state-of-
affairs, not an assertion (tho it may be griceanly understood as an assertion).
AFAICS, expressing an emotion of happiness about a proposition/soa does
not entail that the p/soa is the case, and the belief that it does entail
that the p/soa is the case is a malglico carryover from "to be happy that p"
(& cf. "to be happy for X to do Y", which doesn't entail X has done Y).

AR:
> <Ideally, I'd like to see a careful separation between attitudes to/emotions
> about a proposition, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, indications
> of whether P (or even not-P) is being asserted. Hoping, for example, seems
> to be made up of "P is desirable" and "I am not asserting that P is the
> case" (or perhaps something stronger like "I am asserting that I do not
> know that P is the case"). But one could have the assertives on their own
> without the attitude indicators, and one could combine desidertation with
> assertions ("P is desirable and is the case") and nonassertions (e.g.
> "mmm! me a millionaire" = "p is desirable (& may or may not be the case)").
> Perhaps, then, a'o could be seen as shorthand for "ui ju'anai" or similar.>

PC:
> Again, while something like your unpacking of "hope" or {a'o} has been
> suggested, it has been countered by a number of cases of thinks hoped for but
> not pleasure generating and conversely.

I guess I will have to plough/plow through that thread after all.

But note that I said "desirable", not "pleasure generating".

> It is so far only a hypotheses that
> all (or any) of the projecting forms can be analyzed in this way (or that all
> or any of the 'simple emotions' have projective versions).

... where 'projective' means "entailing that p is (not) the case", I take it.

The contraries of these hypotheses are also hypotheses. It scarcely needs to
be pointed out that any rational analysis of attitudinals (or whatever) must
be founded on some hypothesis.

> <Has agreement been reached about the grammar of (3), though? That seems to
> be the key thing.>
>
> My 3)? Well, the Book sets it up one way, but there are proposals to change
> it, specifically to show whether the sentence is asserted or not.

Another thing I'll have to trawl though that thread for. Surely the way to
*show* that a sentence is asserted is to use an appropriate UI (ju'a?).

--And.