Re: On {lo} and existence

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Jorge:
> > Utterances containing a +specific reference
> > determine a unique but incomplete proposition.
> So you are saying that the determination of the referent comes
> from some factor external to the utterance.

Yes.

> > Propositions not determined by the grammar can be derived from
> > these complete or incomplete propositions that are determined by
> > the grammar.
> And this is the pragmatic step, I suppose, that requires something
> absent in the utterance in order to extract the final "meaning".

Yes.

> > > What kind of proposition does something like {ai mi klama} determine?
> > (iii) {ai}: I think this means that once we have decided how to fill
> > > the empty places of the predicate Klama, the resulting predication is
> > claimed to be true of the world of your intentions:
> >   true(proposition345,world-of-Jorge's-intentions,1)
> > And this predication is in turn claimed to be true of the universe
> > of discourse.
> So:
>     true(proposition346,universe-of-discourse,1)
> And I won't ask you in what universe is that last one claimed to be
> true, or we may never get to the end of it.

I think it amounts to a claim independent of worlds, in that it has
the same truth value in all worlds.

> > > If meaning enters, why couldn't a more sophisticated grammatical
> > > analysis detect irony as well?
> > Because irony isn't determined by grammatical rules. Grammatical
> > analysis detects that which grammatical rules have determined.
> What if there was an attitudinal that meant "irony" (zo'o in some cases,
> perhaps). We can't let tone of voice be a part of Lojban, but why can't
> it be a part of grammar for an ordinary language? As well as many other
> cues that a better grammar might be able to pick up from the context.

If there was an irony attitudinal, then this wd become part of the
grammatically-determined meaning. On the view that an ironic utterance
is presented as a not-necessarily-attributed quotation, the g-d
meaning wd say "lahe dei is not necessarily being claimed to be true
of any world; rather, lahe dei is a representation of another speaker's
utterance". Of course you could then use such an attitudinal ironically,
to unquotatively say things you believe are literally true, so g-d
meaning can never overcome the subversive power of pragmatics.

If by "tone of voice" you mean intonation, you may be right that it
grammaticalizes many meanings one might have thought to have been
purely pragmatic. This is an underresearched area, even for English.
But the fact will remain that not all meaning will be grammatically
determined.

> > I still don't think this is so. If the grammatically-determined meaning
> > doesn't include a specification of which world fills x2 of True, then
> > the speaker(s) and every hearer of the utterance are free to pick
> > a different world as x2, with resulting variation in what the truth
> > value in x3 will be.
> What type of utterances do have the world place filled? You said that
> one with {ai} has that place filled. What about one with no attitudinals?
> How can you tell whether the world place has been filled? Is there any
> utterance for which it is clear from the grammar, or is it always
> pragmatics?

It depends on the grammar. If the grammar says that in the absence of
an attitudinal the world place is filled by the u-of-d, then that's
that. If the grammar doesn't say what fills the world place, then
again, that's that - it is to be worked out ("glorked", in Cowanese)
from context.

[long explication of utterance interp omitted]
> Ok. I see what you are saying. Then truth values in general are quite
> useless for the process of comunication. What matters is the relevant
> truth value, which is the truth value of the proposition in the relevant
> world. Obviously the speaker has one world in mind, and the comunication
> succeeds if the comprehender calculates the truth value in that world.
> Otherwise, the comprehender didn't comprehend all that well.

Yes.

There is an appealing Lojbo proclivity to ignore cooperation between
interlocutors and take utterances at their face value, as in the
goat's legs debate ("You may mean that a goat has at least two legs,
and your addressee may understand that, but what you are literally
saying is that a goat has exactly two legs"). You could say, then,
that there is in some quarters a proclivity to ignore pragmatics and
get on with semantics. (I of course am much in sympathy with this,
especially when the object of study is an invented superrational
language.)

> So let me define the truth value of an utterance as the truth value
> of the proposition derived from it, in the world intended by the
> speaker. (To use your language. In my language, the speaker and the
> comprehender have a contract that says that their utterances should
> be taken in the universe of discourse, and there are no true() claims
> being made, only the basic propositions are claimed.)

Okay.

> > They don't give utterances truth values, because utterances don't
> > have truth values. Propositions have truth values, but that doesn't
> > mean that entertaining a proposition necessitates computing its
> > truth value.
> Of course not. It may be that one assumes its truth, in the case one
> is being informed of something. What _is_ necessary is understanding
> what it means that the proposition is true (or false). If the proposition
> is understood, that means that one understands what it means for the
> proposition to be true or to be false. If one has previous information
> that conflicts with the proposition being true, the one will tend to
> believe that it is false (or discard the previous information, or keep
> both but knowing that one must be false). In any case, it is important
> to know what it means for the proposition to be true.

Exactly.

> So for the comprehender to have successfully understood the speaker
> he must have selected a world, and thus been able to understand
> what it means for the proposition to be true in that world. That is
> what I call *the* truth value. It may or may not be known, but it is
> well defined.

Fine.

> > I think we can talk about *the* truth value of a proposition if this
> > value is an infinite set of pairs matching worlds to values between 0
> > and 1.
> I don't much care about that one. The important one is the truth value
> of the utterance, as I defined above. For communication to succeed,
> all those matching other worlds are quite irrelevant.
> > By this definition of truth value, we could then say that only Step 2
> > can result in two people hearing the same utterance coming up with
> > different completed propositions which may then have different truth
> > values. So if Step 2 can be skipped, if the utterance contains
> > only overt -specific sumti, then it becomes possible to associate
> > such an utterance with a truth value.
> Yes, but not very useful. The only one of interest is the one
> corresponding to the speaker's intended world, which hopefully was
> correctly aprehended by the comprehender.

I don't think we need disagree on anything. We can distinguish your
"relevant truth value" from my "truth value set". There's no need
to argue about which of these bags the term "*the* truth value".

> > > My position now is that I would like that {ro nu broda cu fasnu}.
> > > Otherwise, if it is decided that {ro nu broda na fasnu}, then
> > > that should be equivalent to {ro da'inai nu broda na fasnu}, so that
> > > there is no exception in the use of {da'i}.
> > You understand me right. I won't accept your view, because a potential
> > event is indistinguishable from a dahi event. If {nu} is inherently
> > {dahi}, then using an overt {dahinai} will not override the inherent
> > {dahi}, thus ruling out a way to restrict {nu} only to actually
> > happening events.
> I'm against {nu} being {da'i} then, inherently or implicitly.

So will you from now on say {mi troci lo dahi nu mi klama}?

---
And