WikiDiscuss

And:
> xorxes:
> > And:
> > > Okay, but one would like to somehow be able to make unambiguous
> > > claims to the effect that exactly two things have the property of
> > > doctorhood in the world in which I need them.
> >
> > That would be {re da mikce}, "exactly two things have the
> > property of being a doctor".
>
> I.e. {re da zo'u ge da mikce gi mi nitcu da}? So that is not
> synonymous with {mi nitcu re mikce}? (That's a neutral question.)

They are synonymous as far as I can tell.
Also {re se nitcu be mi cu mikce}, although the focus is
different in all three.

I think I misunderstood what you meant by "in the world in which
I need them". {da} can take any value from the universe of discourse,
not just those things that exist in the world. To restrict to those,
we would need something like {da poi zasti le munje}. There is no
gadri that automatically imposes the restriction {poi zasti le munje}.

....
> I understand this — the universe of discourse can simultaneously
> contain something that is a needer in World X but not necessarily
> in World Y, and something that is a doctor in World Y but not
> necessarily in World X.
>
> But what I'm asking is how to say "something is such that in
> one and the same world, I need it and it is a doctor".

How about: {mi nitcu lo mikce ku noi zasti mi}?
But that's the abnormal claim. In general it will be the case
that: {mi nitcu lo mikce poi zasti mi ku}, because a doctor
that doesn't exist where I exist would not be much use. The
{poi zasti mi} clause need not be explicited because it
is usually obvious.

> > You can draw two unicorns into existence, but you can't
> > eat them into existence, so that would be the difference
> > between those predicates.
>
> That's not really the distinction I mean. Our local mythology
> may contain unicorns that already exist in that mythology.
> I might draw two of them (Dasher and Prancer, say) without
> thereby bringing them into existence. But "I photographed
> two unicorns", unlike "I drew two unicorns", entails that
> the photographees exists in the same world as the one in
> which I took the photo.

I don't think that distinction is made with gadri.
{ta pixra lo re pavyseljirna poi ranmi danlu} "that's a picture
of two unicorns which are mythological animals" and
{ta pixra lo re pavyseljirna poi ca'a zasti le ma'a munje}
"that's a picture of two unicorns that actually exist in
our world".

> I opine that a proposition is claimed to be true of some
> particular world (-- and the universe of discourse can
> span many worlds). I further opine that it is desirable to
> have some way to indicate whether two propositions (such as
> "mi nitcu da" and "da mikce") are claimed true of the same
> world (since there seems to me to be a pretty patent
> distinction in meaning).

I don't know if Lojban is equipped to handle different worlds
in such detail. Other than {mu'ei} (that serves to quantify
over worlds but not to refer to a particular world) we don't
have a lot of world machinery.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

__
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - You care about security. So do we.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail