Subject: Re: [lojban] A or B, depending on C, and related issues

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 16:54:57

la pycyn cusku di'e

>Yup! One problem with working at a dash when you have lousy handwriting
>(never mind P anQ, it's T and F that are the problems).

I use 1 and 0, but I could also use V and F which are
distinct enough.

>I would have taken the reduction as evidence that this was a totally
>inappropriate rendition of "Q or R depending on P" since it says that Q or 
>R
>regardless of P (or anything else).

Well, they have the same truth table, that doesn't mean it's
a good rendition. I think it means that "Q or R depending on P"
is not well represented by a three way logical connective.
(Neither is the causal "regardless", of course.)

>But then, I don't understand what all of
>this has to do with indirect questions exactly -- or with whatever keeps
>being called indirect questions while being neither (unless "indirect" 
>means
>"vague").

It has to do in that forms like "Whether A happens depends
on whether B happens", or "what x does depends on what y
does", etc, involve these so called "indirect question" forms.

>I suppose "{xn} depends on {ym}" means something like "there is a set of 
>true
>conditionals (not necessarily truth-functional, if that bothers people) 
>whose
>antecedents are each a member of {ym} and whose consequents are members of
>{xn}" and then some details about completeness and exclusiveness -- which
>might vary from case to case, as might the details of how the conditionals
>run. The vaguer terms ("what's for dinner," "what's in the icebox," "what
>the weather is") just cover these lack of details, while guaranteeing the
>gneral (though possibly vacuous) claim.

"depending" is vacuous as a logical connective, not as a predicate.
As a predicate it probably involves all these internal conditionals
you make allusion to.

For example, I can say:

le nu mi dasni makau cu jalge le nu mi klama makau
What I wear depends on (results from) where I go.

I'm not saying a lot there, but I am saying something.

>The only connection I can see between all this and questions is the
>possibility that
>expressions like "what's in the icebox" stands for a set of answers (claims
>in this case, not propositions).

To my understanding so far, it stands for The Right Answer rather
than for a set, but I certainly don't have a full theory, or
anything even close to that.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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