Re: more epistemic perversity

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>Seems to me that any appearance of conflict between the
>two positions expressed by {la .and.} & {la lojbab.}
>should have been dispelled by Jorge's point - which I
>originally resisted, then conceded - that even the
>violations involve an ironical, insincere or facetious
>presupposition.  I would add "sympathetic" to that list.
>
>When {la lojbab.} refers to a claim that he himself
>disputes as something that {la .and.} "knows", he is
>suspending his own disbelief in order to describe that
>claim as knowledge.  Such a suspension of disbelief
>might be ironical but, in many cases, it might be
>sympathetic.  For instance, in a narrative which seeks
>to track the viewpoint of another person, the speaker
>or author might suspend disbelief in a {le se djuno}
>as a way of inhabiting, or sympathizing with, the {le
>djuno}'s viewpoint, a la Stanislawski's "method acting".
>
>Jorge was very effective in persuading me that, when I
>was resisting his point, I was defining "presupposition"
>too narrowly.  If we follow his recommendation to define
>it more broadly, IMO we can agree with both sides in
>this debate, especially if we acknowledge the kind of
>presupposition that I'm calling "sympathetic".

I do not have much problem with what you are saying, though what
I am maintaining doesn't quite fit "sympathetic" either.  Rather,
when I state that And "knows" somethingby his epistemologies that
are either opaque or unconvincing to me, I am merely recognizing
my own lack of omniscience and the relativity of truth and
knowledge in some te djuno.

The other  weakness of Jorge's version is the perfectly human
capability to entertain contradictary concepts at once.  There
is nothing stoppoing a human being from knowing X by one
epistemology and knowing NOT X by some other epistemology.
Clearly in such a case "believe" is no more useful that "know",
and I doubt that "opine"/jinvi is either.  The way we commonly
resolve this is for one of the two knowledges to be expressed with
"know" and the other with "really believe" or similar such wording,
with the "knowledge" label going to that truth which is more
conventional.

But in a system of relativism with regard to truth, and in a language
with no culture to establish "conventional wisdom", it is not
appropriate for the language to prescrine that one of the contradictory
knowledges in "known" while the other is merely "believed".

It may be that some people are so wedded to the concept of "the real world"
about which there are truths that are nonrelative, and that all other
so=called "truths" are merely beliefs or wishful thinking or ideals, that
they cannot entertain the relative universe of that Chinese philsopher who
did not know whether he was dream that he was a butterfly or whether he
was a butterfly fdreaming he was a Chinese philosopher.

lojbab