xorlo & mi nitcu lo mikce
Let's see. xorxes is right (of course) that
Lojban (nor any language) does not per se
(langage) favor one world over another. To be
sure, Lojban favors one *kind* of world over
another (I have done both Process philosophy and
Theravada Buddhism in Lojban but it is a real
strain — and it loses much of its spice since
the basic concepts are so patently abstracted
from the ordinary things that the philosophy
purports to be constructing). But among the
various possible object-abstraction-setworlds it
does not choose.
The language in use (parole) however does favor
one among the possible worlds. Language is a
social activity which involves shared references
among the conversants. And the world in which
two conversant are (their "this world" as it
were) is in the beginning the only guaranteed
shared domain of reference. (This a tad
optimistic since there may be more in one
person's this world than in the other — consider
a theist and an atheist talking for example and
notice how often their conversation fails for
this very reason. But even they share a large
overlapping mass of reality and, as long as they
stick to that, they can converse quite
effectively.) To move out of this given common
world takes some indicator (not necessarily
linguistic — sitting on a certain rock in a
certain pose tells everyone that what you are
saying is about Dreamtime, not here-and-now.
Shifting without flags is at least to be at risk
of being misunderstood and quite likely to be
subject to sanctions — whatever may be
appropriate ("Don't do that" to murder, say).
So the way to say that something exists in the
real world is basically to to say it exists and
make sure that no contrary flags are
up.(Actually, when we are off in alternate
worlds, we have explicit devices for getting back
to *this* one — though I can't remember how that
is lexed at the moment and some clever soul may
have junked it as useless.) To say it exists in
some other world to to make sure the flags are up
and then say it exists. The same language works
for both (as in the first point) but the context
of use (the more explicit the better, generally)
determines which world it refers to.
So xorxes is right again at the end — it is not
a gadri thing, since the gadri all work equally
well in whatever world we are in (and, of course,
the same is true of {ca'a} and the like).