Re: veridicality trivial?

[Nick Legend Nicholas <nsn@SPEECH.LANGUAGE.UNIMELB.EDU.AU>]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' DLS9@AOL.COM jay'?

ju'ido'u le'ozo'o .i do cazi .ei pu'o gunma fanva la xamlet. fu le
bangrtlingana .i ko di'a gunka doi cando

And's just asked what I think about all this. I think (a) now that I've
finished my part of _Hamlet_, it's about time I returned to these climes;
(b) I've got a lot of reading on philosophy of language to do if I'm not to
respond with mere hunches (not that hunches aren't valuable!); (c) I've got
a backlog of 939 messages...

=bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu cuska di'e
=>jorge@phyast.pitt.edu cuska di'e
=>    > In Lojban, an imperative is true iff the command is carried out.
=>    Is that true? I thought imperatives didn't have truth values.
=>This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Loglan.  *Every* predication
=>is considered true or false.  This is fundamental to the language.

I'm sure And knows this better than I, but from my reading, logicians choose
to call "make it true" imperatives something other than true themselves; the
same would go for speech acts like "could you pass the salt, please?" ---
which does not meet 'felicity conditions', and thus is pointless/invalid/
fails if there's no salt around.

(Speech acts are the kinds of utterances which effect something in the real
world --- requests, orders, promises, permissions, etc. Assertions are
considered speech acts too --- inasmuch as they affect the listener's model
of the world.)

=Why doesn't this seem right? Perhaps it might be better to think of an
=imperative as expressing the truth that the speaker wants the statement to
=become true. He who says {ko ciska lo plipe} wants {do ciska lo plipe} to be
=true. Similarly, interrogatives could be thought of as expressing the truth
=that the speaker wants some particular piece of information, for which he
=prompts the listener(s). In effect, an interrogative is an imperative to
=provide information.

=ko ciska lo plipe

=It is true that I want you to eat the apple.

As usual, my colleague makes a perceptive response :), but the fact is, if
*any* of the (felicity) conditions for the speech act becoming fulfilled are
absent (if, for example, there's no salt around), then the speech act itself
will bomb. Similarly, if I promise you something I know will never happen.
Making "ko citka lo plise" (ko ciska lo plipe means "write the leaper" ---
something to do with Quantum Leap, perhaps? :) ) "true" would be more like:

.i mi djica lenu do citka lo plise
.i je do jimpe la'elu ko citka lo plise li'u
.i je do ca na citka lo plise
.i je mi jinvi le du'u do ka'e citka lo plise
.i je mi krici le du'u seni'i lenu mi na'e minde kei do banai citka lo plise
 kei
.i je lenu mi minde cu nu troci lenu do citka lo plise
.i je mi minde fi lo balvi pe do

"I want you to eat an apple" is only one of the felicity conditions (the
sincerity condition).

And even that won't quite work: the whole reason Speech Act Theory was
developed in the '60s was as a reaction to Logical Positivism, which claimed
that every utterance *could* be verified as true or false. Doing things
with words is not itself true or false: they need a context for the felicity
conditions to be tested.

Stephen Levinson's _Pragmatics_, from the Cambridge Textbooks In Linguistics
series (1983) is an excellent introduction to things like speech acts; of
course, speech acts are a bit marginal to what's being argued here, and as
soon as I work out what *is* being argued here, I may well do some trekking
to the library...

--
 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
 Nick Nicholas. Melbourne University, Aus. nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au
                                    ---
"Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish.
Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so
grotesque."
-- Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>, <9307262008.AA95951@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>