Re: tech harangue on le/lo

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

On Wed, 13 Dec 1995, Jorge Llambias wrote:

> pc:
> > On opacity, I remember [...] someone
> > jumping from the claim that someone was hunting loi <unicorn> to
> > the claim that there were unicorns.
>
> That could have been me. :)
>
> > I pass over whether a loi is the
> > right thing to be hunting,
>
> In that case, if you don't use {loi}, then there need not be unicorns.
No more does it with {loi}; indeed the typical unicorn (see next) is more
likely to exist than any submass of the empty mass
> For example
>
>         da kalte lo'e pavyseljirna
>         Someone is a unicorn-hunter.
>
> does not say that there are unicorns being hunted.
>
> > to remind (because we did go through
> > this less than a year ago) all that "hunt" and its Lojban translations
> > create an opaque object position,
>
> Not necessarily, in my opinion. Or are you saying that there is
> no way in Lojban to say "That lion, Clarence, is being hunted
> by John". If the x2 of {kalte} was always opaque, we could not use
> it for the transparent use of "hunt".
There are, as I recall, at least three.  One is to be sure that that
lion, Clarence, is introduced well outside the intensional context --
another sentence or a prenex with appropriate anaphora will do.  The
second is to mark the buried occurrence with the "external reference"
mark (which, I recall was not needed for local descriptions and known
names).  The third, which you might have been using but took you not to
be (and so it now appears), is to use both tu'a and xe'e (or whatever it
was) and then allow them to cancel out to an unmarked form.  this third
is the most risky, of course, because it may result simply from
carelessness or ignorance of the nature of the place, rather than really
claiming there is a referent in this world.
> I think that "he is hunting lions" in the opaque sense has the
>same kind of feature as "he builds houses", in the sense of "he is a
> house-builder". There need be no houses to instantiate that claim.
> In those cases I use {lo'e zmadi} and {lo'e cinfo}.
But the established logic and Lojban (even Loglan) is a tanru for these
cases -- states rather than activities
> > which strictly in Lojban ought to
> > have a "subject raising" mark (_tu'o_ ?  not what my list says but I
> > seem to recall that the list I have is wrong)
>
> {tu'a}
>
> > unless cancelled (as it
> > is not in this case) by an external reference mark (one of those
> > _xe'V_ from that discussion).  "Hunt" and the Lojban as well have
> > the deep structure of a verb ("get," "kill," "catch," or some such) in
> > the scope of a "strive to bring to pass" main verb, so the surface
> > object actually comes up two semantic layers, even if no syntactic
> > ones.
>
> That may be so, but that does not mean that you can't use the
> transparent meaning of those verbs.
>
> Let's say {kalte} means {troci le nu kavbu}, "try to catch".
>
> Then I can say:
>
> (1)     mi troci le nu da poi cinfo zo'u mi kavbu da
>         I try that there be a lion such that I catch it.
>
> (2)     da poi cinfo zo'u mi troci le nu mi kavbu da
>         There is a lion such that I try to catch it.
>
> Now, which one of those is this:
>
> (3)     da poi cinfo zo'u mi kalte da
>         There is a lion such that I hunt it.
>
> I would say that (3) has the meaning of (2). That means that {kalte}
> behaves normally, like any other predicate. If (3) means (1), then
> we would need to make a list of all the gismu places that have this
> weird feature. In my opinion there should be none.
3 does mean 2, since the quantifier is nicely outside the opaque context.
The problem is having 3 mean 1 or inferring 3 (or 2) from 1.  I think it
would be very nice indeed if there were no gismu that had opaque places
except those that took full lenu (etc.) sumti.  But I also think that no
one would tolerate losing all the familiar words (hunt, want, etc.) that
have those places (and do in countless natural languages -- how do you
think philosophers keep in business?  It may not be Lojban's job to
solve philosophical problems, but, if the problem has a solution -- as
this one does, Lojban should incorporate it and, to that extent, keep
philosophitis at bay).

pc>|83