WikiDiscuss

---

wrote:

>
> 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.

That is, they are all pretty certainly false,
unless there are exactly two people (in the
universe of discourse)who collaboratively can
handle the problem I have. But that changes the
meaning of at least {mi nitcu re mikce} as it
appears to have been intended (as an adequate
translation of "I need two doctors."

> 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 assume that the quantifiers also do not impose
that restriction (a common one for quantifiers,
but not essential — though having a quantifier
that does this is usually handy)

> > 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.

But now the problem comes around again that this
claim is usually false, even though the
corresponding one in English might well be true.
There is no doctor in the relevant world that the
speaker needs — another one would do as well.

> > > 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".

Aside from saying that pictures of unicorns are
unicorns — as you seem to do sometimes — I
agree with this: it is not a gadri issue.

> > 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.

We can build it fairly easily with {munje} and
the like but I don't see the point here.
Quantifiers in *** may be over different worlds
than covered in the rest of a sentence. And that
is all that is needed for everything that has
turned up so far.