Re: more epistemic perversity

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

>>>If George is
>>>presumed to be telling the truth about his internal state then
>>>John should be able to report this fact as "George knows X".
>>
>>Not if X is not true and John knows it.
>
>But it should not matter what John knows.  The claim to be evaluated is
>"George knows X", and the truth or falsity of that claim should stand on
its
>own.

An so it does. Please read again what I wrote. You are still
confusing assertions with truths.

Of course what John believes is relevant to what he says. If he's
being honest he will say what he believes.

What John believes is in general not relevant to the truth of
his assertions. (In some cases it is, e.g. if he says "I believe that ..."

So we agree that the speaker's beliefs are not relevant to the
truth of  "George knows X".

>It should not be based on something irrelevant, such as the person
>who happens to say it.  If you see the statement "George knows X" written
>on a wall, and have no idea who wrote it, the whether that person who wrote
it
>thought X was true is irrelevant.

We agree.

>  More likely you as reader will evaluate
>truth based on whether YOU consider X true, not on whether the
speaker/writer
>considers X true.

Yes, that's what anybody will do to evaluate the truth of any sentence:
compare its meaning with their perception of the world.
If they match, it's true. If they don't, it's false. (If they match to a
certain
extent then it's true to a certain extent.)

> So now we have a sentence that has a different truth
>value to George, an unknown speaker, and you the reader (3 different truth
>values are possible of course if we go fuzzy), and this seems nonsensical
>without EXPLICIT context as to the standard for truth of x2.

If you accept that different people will assign different truth values to X,
why do you find it strange that they will also assign different truth values
to "George knows X"?

>Your claim
>thus seems justification that English "know" requires such a standard of
>truth in order to evaluate the truth conditions of a statement.

Not "know" in particular. Whichever standard you use to evaluate
the truth value of  "George knows X" or of  "That is a cat" could be
applied to the evaluation of  the truth of "X".

>It is not
>merely sufficient to invoke the speaker as the standard because the speaker
>is not always the standard - the listener might be, or George might be,
>depending on the context.

Right. I did not invoke the speaker as the standard. The speaker only
decides what assertions to make. The speaker does not decide what
is the truth value of the assertions (although the speaker usually
believes them true).

>>>But as I understand it, you would have John's
opinion/presumption/knowledge
>>>somehow enter into the definition of djuno,
>>
>>Not in the definition. It enters in how John uses {djuno}, yes.
>
>This sounds like a usage issue then and not a definitional one.

Right. But you brought it up, not me. The speaker's opinions do not
enter into the definition of djuno. That x2 has to be true and x1 has to
be a person in order for the djuno claim to be true (indeed to make
sense) is not dependent on the speaker's or anybody else's opinions.

>Whether or not
>John would use djuno if he disputes the truth of le se djuno is of course
up
>to John.

Of course.

> But if truth of x2 is critical and Sam reads the sentence
>la djordj cu djuno X, Sam will not care what speaker John thought about the
>truth ofx2, but will consider only what George and Sam evaluate as true

Right.

>(unless perhaps John is some kind of authority, in which case the x4 would
>vary on staements of djuno in order to invoke John).

I'm not sure what you mean. Sam would still only consider her own
evaluations of truth. She may think that everything John says is true, so
maybe that's why she accepts both "X" and "George knows X" as true. What
I say she cannot do consistently is evaluate "X" as false and "George
knows X" as true.

 >But the cases where know/djuno will be used for things that a speaker may
not
>consider true is for things where objective truth is not necessarily
available.

{djuno} might very well end up being used like that, but "know" is not
used like that.

>All you have shown is that there are places where "is convinced" breaks
down
>as a trnaslation for djuno, just as your implication have shown that "know"
>sometimes breaks down as a translation for djuno.

All I tried to show was that "know" and "is convinced" differ in that one
has presupposition of truth and the other doesn't. This is a separate
issue from whether {djuno} is a good translation for either one of them,
for neither or for both. That was the only point of the parallel examples.
You have not given a convincing explanation for why "is convinced" works
and "knows" doesn't in cases of subclauses considered false. Your
explanations about subjective/objective truths doesn't work, because
"knows" breaks down in both cases, and "is convinced" works in both
cases as well, so subjectivity/objectivity is not relevant. This issue is
separate from the issue of what is the meaning of {djuno}.

>>No problem with that. If you believe that there is a God, then you
>>might say:
>>
>>        la djan djuno le du'u la cev cu zasti
>>        John knows that God exists.
>
>But an atheist would say that my statement is false, and what >I< presumed
>in saying it has no bearing on the truth of the statement.  At least if we
>base djuno on English usage.

Right.

 >>But if you believe that God does not exist, then you would not
>>say either of those, because both presuppose the existence of God.
>
>But what does
>la djef na djuno le du'u la cev cu zasti
>mean - you seem to imply that it also presupposes the existence of God.

No. I purposefully used {naldjuno}. Negation with {na} is different
for the usual scope reasons. {na} negates the whole bridi, so that
the x2 being false is enough to make the na-negated bridi true. This is
not like English, because "doesn't" has not as wide a scope
as {na}.

>But the proper Lojbanic way to deny a ledu'u that we consider false in such
>a statement is NOT with "na" on the bridi, but with na'i on the du'u
clause.

I agree.


> If I want to inject MY beliefs into a
>statement about George's knowledge, I should use the appropriate
>member of UI

Your callling it "knowledge" injects your beliefs into it. You believe it
to be knowledge.

>>> This is not the case for "believe" or "be certain", where "how?"
>>>or "why?" are not always meaningful.
>>
>>It seems to be meaningful for  "be certain".
>>"How can you be so sure?" seems seems pretty natural.
>
>And it is a perfectly acceptable answer to say "I just am."

Yes, and "I just do" is just as acceptable as an answer to the
question "how do you know?"  So the viability of the "how?"
question doesn't help us to separate "knows" from "is certain".

 >> >But you are claiming that if by some chance after I die that a tenth
>>>planet is discovered, that
>>>la lojbab pu djuno le du'u so da cu plini le solri
 >>>somehow becomes false
>>
>>It doesn't "become" false. We discover that it is false.
>>We discover that you and everybody else were mistaken.
>>It happens all the time.
>
>But if the statement doesn't "become" false, then it was false all the
time,

Right.

>and thsu your presupposition of the truthof x2 is in the final analysis
>quite irrelevant to the truth of the djuno bridi.

No, that doesn't follow. the truth of the djuno bridi requires the truth of
x2.
Maybe at some point we thought x2 to be true and the djuno bridi to be
true as well. When we discover that x2 was not true after all, we
simultaneously discover that the djuno bridi was not true either.

> When we discover that
>something is false, all earlier presuppositions become irrelevant, and
hence
>were not really part of the meaning of the word itself.

I don't understand what you mean.

co'o mi'e xorxes