Subject: Re: [lojban] Whatever

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 15:37:55 EDT

In a message dated 8/5/2001 5:17:19 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Let's consider first a ju-sentence:
> 
> mi ba te vecnu ta iju ta rupnu makau
> I will buy that, whatever it costs.
> 
> In other words, whatever the answer to "how much does that
> cost?" is, I will buy it. This works because ju prevents
> the second sentence from being a claim. A claim could never
> contain makau because nothing would be claimed, or rather,
> it becomes a tautology, since obviously the true answer to
> the question, whatever it is, has to be true.
> 
> {xukau} is indeed the tautology marker, so {da'au} is not
> necessary. Since ju by itself changes whatever follows into
> a tautology, it is not necessary to use xukau there, but it
> doesn't hurt either:
> 
What a horrible way to put it! Sentences after {ju} make claims; the claims 
they make just have no role to play in the larger sentence. Nor are 
sentences after {ju} thereby tautologies. They act like tautolgies in 
conjunctions, to be sure -- but they equally act like contradictions in 
disjunctions. And, since U is neither a conjunction nor a disjunction, the 
sentences following it are neither tautologies nor contradictions -- by being 
after {ju}. Nor is {xukau} a tautology marker, though {xukau p} may always 
be true. But it is, in fact, either p or ~p, neither of which is (generally 
speaking) a tautology. Similarly for a sentence containing {makau} (if such 
make sense)-- they may be true but they are not tautologies (and they may be 
problematic even to truth until we find what fills the {makau} slot).
The examples with attitudinals are more plausible, except that we don't 
understand attitudinals very well, so this may be ignotum per ignotius, and 
they seem to be sayable without the indirect questions -- assuming (which I 
do with great reluctance) that I understand what they are meant to mean.