Subject: Re: [lojban] Tentative summary on Attitudinals

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 5 Jul 2001 22:32:02 EDT

In a message dated 7/5/2001 8:29:43 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<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).>
No, it is a complete uttered bridi, neither a proposition nor a state of 
affairs (though it means one and refers to the other). This is pre-Grice, 
since the fact that it is uttered is crucial (and all the bit about seriously 
meaning to communicate and whatever). 

<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).>
Note that p is not a complete sentence in either of these last two cases, so 
we are into another problem -- about entailments from subordinate clauses and 
the like (cf. "know" of considerable infamy).

> Surely the way to
> *show* that a sentence is asserted is to use an appropriate UI (ju'a?).
> 

I think that the assumption in the Book -- and in the history of 
Lojban/Loglan has always been that bridi assertions are primary and that 
deviations from that required a mark, but that assertions did not. Now, 
given my own inclination toward sorting out various uses of language and 
dealing with them separately, I suppose I should reconsider this. But it is 
certainly not yet the case that assertions need marks.
In particular, UI on a sentence begins life as a simple decorations -- 
emotive responses to something, with the first suggestion as to what being 
the sentence to which they are grammatically attached, if any. And a large 
set of these emotions can be viewed as responses to the situation presented 
in the sentence on the assumption that that situation actually obtains. This 
is less a malglico than a mal-human-language, if it is mal-anything, rather 
than inherent in the ejaculative pattern in langage [sic].
Other "emotions" (I am not sure that this is the right word for these) 
equally require that the events responded to be uncertain, even known not to 
hold, even known impossible, perhaps. Yet in Lojban they have (for now, 
anyhow) the same grammar as those that only apply to the occurrent. (Don't 
bother, by the way, scouring the threads for the various proposals about how 
to solve this matter -- there is no consensus yet and the bases of the 
proposals are alaid out adequately in the sketch, though you have added two 
more possibilities that were not in the list: response to the proposition in 
absttaction (or generalization) or a causal connection. The placement 
possibilities are initial, pre- and post-selbri and final and maybe a variety 
of special hooks. Frankly I like your separation pattern better, but none of 
them much compared to the present "system" (the lack of system being its 
major flaw).

<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.>

While established practice does not quite constitute a theory, it does make a 
starting place for an analysis and that is the line I am following, for the 
most part. Although, analyzing attitudinals does not require any particular 
theory as such at the beginning, since it seems first to be merely getting 
lists and classifying (oh, right! classification requires the notion that 
some things are more important than others and so a theory -- but here we 
have what has come up in discussion as a guide). 

<> 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.

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

Which means you have to unpack that notion a bit (who, when, why, where, 
how?) -- not that "pleasure generating" is exactly clear. But it seems 
possible to hope for something quite undesirable (unless you mean ala Mill 
that someone desires it) and, of course, there are many desirable things 
(even known to be such) that no one hopes for. "The not known not to be" 
condition seems required for "hope" and, I should say, {a'o} and {pacna} as 
well (see the comments sections in the relevant word lists).