xorlo & mi nitcu lo mikce
wrote:
>
> --- And:
>
> > It may sound like I am introducing a wholly
> new idea, but I believe
> > that the general lojbanological understanding
> was, implicitly, that
> > all propositions in a clause were claimed to
> be true of one and
> > the same world.
>
> I don't dispute there was a tendency (and maybe
> there still is)
> to do that, but surely it could never have been
> absolute
> because some predicates (like xanri) require
> their arguments to
> exist in different worlds.
This is one of the reasons for suggesting that
{xanri1} is intensional or (better) that the
preferred sumti is an abstractum. Of course,
this does not require that the referent is not in
the current world — the sentence may be false
after all or about someone, in (xanri2}, who
imagines something that is in fact real.
> > That is no longer the case, since {ti pixra
> pa
> > -detective} can now describe a depiction of
> Sherlock Holmes, even
> > when it is mutually manifest in the context
> that Holmes is a
> > literary fiction. I think therefore that
> there has been an
> > ontological shift in Lojban of late. I don't
> object to it, but I
> > do think there ought to be a way of
> expressing things with the
> > old-style meaning too.
>
> We don't impose any ontology on Lojban.
> Speakers are free to use
> the language in such a way that they only refer
> to non-fictional
> things if they so wish.
We don't impose an ontology on Lojban, but the
facts of the case do have some relevance (impose
an ontology — although that is not quite the
right word, so we take it in the Lojban sense)
and we should be prepared to deal with it. If we
can get to a thing only by passing through
someone's thought processes, it should be
distinguished from something we can get to by
walking around.