WikiDiscuss

I have been raising this as a gadri issue only because
in an ancestral version of xorlo it was treated as such
and because that was the only solution I was ever
satisfied was satisfactory. But I'm not trying to
argue that xorlo needs to be altered.

xorxes:
> 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}.

Yes, you'd misunderstood me.

> > 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.

I think this might work, except that there remains an ambiguity.
Suppose there are two statues of unicorns in front of me, and I
draw them, and say "ta pixra re pavyseljirna ku noi zasti ta":
that would be true, because the two drawees do exist in the
same world as ta, even though in ta's world they aren't
unicorns (-- they're statues). So we'd also want a way to
express whether the drawees are unicorns in ta's world.

>
> > > 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".

The first seems okay, but the second doesn't, for two
reasons. Firstly, one can have imaginary things that are defined
as existing in the real world: "lo ca'a zasti le ma'a munje"
needn't refer to something that exists in the real world;
it might refer to "Mr Exister in the RW". Secondly, what
matters (with regard to disambiguation) is whether the
depictee exists in the same world as the depicter (and
whether the depictee has the property of being depicted
in the same world as it has the property of unicornhood).

> > 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.

I'm not saying that Lojban should handle this overtly in
terms of different worlds. I am talking about different worlds
only as a means of explicating the different readings we
get with intensional sumti-places. And I'm suggesting that
Lojbanists might want a robust way to express the readings
distinctly on occasion. Is that reasonable?

--And.