Re: more epistemic perversity (was Re: .i .uepei mi jai selke'u

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>(i) Is there a list of which gismu places are presumed to be subject
>to consensus and which are presumed to be subject to intersubjective
>disagreement?


Since I have been a strong opponent of semantic analysis of Lojban before
usage determines the meanings, I certainly have not even considered such a
list.

>(ii) Your position seems to lead to strange results. For example, the
>truth of {ti mlatu} is presumed to be determinable against some
>consensual metaphysics, but the truth of {"true" fa le du`u ti mlatu}
>is presumed to not be determinable consensually. It seems utterly
>nonsensical to me.

We have epistemological places on those gismu for which I (and others)
recognized there is and has been significant argument regarding the
metaphysics/epistemology.  For other places, where there was no particular
evidence of subjectivity being "metaphysically necessary" to the definition,
we have the capabiliyt of adding such considerations using a BAI such as
vedu'o or perhaps du'o itself.  Thus you can have a subjective mlatu if
you wish.

There was no attempt to make Lojban semantics "systematic" or "logical" in
the4 way that you seem to be seeking (regarding the gismu, that is).  We
were satisfied to make sure that we could cover things that we knew were
"talked about" with sufficient robustness that new ideas for gismu were
analyzable in terms of old ones.  Place structures were analyzed only to
try ot keep like places on the same order (e.g. to from per klama).  At
one time we drifted towards very fat gismu, and then at a later time we
pared them down.  Until pressured by the community, I never felt that the
details of the place structures were all that important - I was quite content
not to even baseline them, but was outvoted.

In my opinion, it is sufficient merely to insist that, whatever the place
structure, that all usages be consistent with the full place structure whether
places are elided or not.  This alone would ensure enormous improvement over
JCB's version of the language, where gismu were used in tanru as straight
loan-translations of their English keyword.

I am reasonably convinced that meanings of djuno which accept the existence
of all 4 places (and hence recognize that knolwedge is tied to epistemology)
are a sufficiently small range of meanings that usage during the early years
of the language will serve better to define the word than any anount of
analysis.  While I clearly have opinions about the meanings, and can state
my intent when I wrote the definitions, usage will determine the meanings
and NOT debate.  There is nothing in the place structure (as opposed to the
choice of keywords) that requires se djuno to be "true" from the standpoint
of the speaker; thus I will have no compulsion about using it to report
"knowledge" that I feel is-or-may-be invalid.  If this makes the keyword an
inopportune choice, so be it - the keywords were never intended to be
defining.

lojbab