Re: Knowledge & Belief

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

>>Date:         Wed, 31 Dec 1997 11:13:23 -0600
>>From: Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>
>>
>><la stivn djuno le du'u la xorxes djuno le du'u la lojbab klama le zarci
>>kei fo da>
>>
>>"Steven knows that Jorge knows that Lojbab goes to the store."
>>
>>The above statement is always false, which considerably limits its utility.
>>I am asserting that it is not possible to directly know that some else
>>knows something.
>
>That means that "djuno" can *never* be used (truthfully) except with a
>first-person x1.  That REALLY limits *its* utility!  Can that be right?
>
>~mark

No.

The default "schema" (to use Mark's terminology for the x4 place of
<Djuno>) would be the internal state which we experience when we have
knowledge. This state is not accessible. It would require something like
telepathy. Even given this use of <djuno>, an author could still write in
the 3rd person omniscient, and that would be fine.

If a different schema were supplied in the x4 place, then some other schema
could of course be used. Also, if a schema were implicit culturally or
situationally, or if a schema was given by an earlier point in the text,
then that schema would be operant.

The example given has no X4 schema supplied, there is no cultural context,
there is no situational context, and there is no other obvious way to
figure out what the criteria for "knowing" are. Thus, I picked the one
which seems closest to what the very terse definition given in the
dictionary was, and that seems to me to imply telepathy.

-Steven

Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria