Re: Summary of summaries on DJUNO

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

>This is not the problem, though it is quite likely that Lojbab
>believes it somehow is. Whether or not you believe there are absolute
>facts, it remains the case that whenever you assert p in Lojban your
>sentence is asserting p to be an absolute fact.

No you are asserting it to be TRUE.  Absolute means independent of all other
considerations.

But even given this, asserting that "John knows X" should assert only that
John knows X, and not necessarily assert X itself, which is what I see your
definition as requiring.

>Language and
>communication requires that we at least pretend that there are
>absolute facts.

I think we need a real postmodernist, and not myself, to argue the contrary.
The postmodernists most clearly are NOT willing to make such pretensions.
I've been involved in theo other side of various debates with postmodernists,
and I understand their argument even if I disagree with it.

>Lojbab has no response to 2.1.

No, I have a different paradigm in mind, and I see the differences implicit
in krici/jinvi/djuno, including in their place structures, to render this
particular contrast invalid.  krici and jinvi do not have epistemology places,
and hence there is a difference between djuno and those two above and
beyond whether x2 is true (if the truth of x2 is even necessary).  Thus

>                 jinvi = justified belief
>                 djuno = justified true belief

is an inadequatre contrast since it does not account for the epistemology

Furthermore, krici is defined quite clearly to not merely apply to any old
belief, but to beliefs that are held without evidence.  Thus opinions which
are based on evidence are not se krici, and this difference is not the
same as "justification", since there are other ways to justify a belief other
than by evidence (logical deduction for example)

The krici/jinvi/djuno contrast thus appears to be a good paradigm, but it
fails based onthe Lojbanic definitions.

>His response to 2.2 is that keywords
>are not defining. My response to that is that other things being
>equal it is better to have a keyword that fits the actual definition
>rather than a completely misleading keyword.

I agree, but that was not the primary consideration in choosing the keywords,
and jhence is an improper argument for the semantics of the Lojban.

>His response to 2.3
>involves counterintuitive definitions of {birti}, etc.

All the Lojban words may have "counterintuitive" definitions to the English
speaker, absed on the English words used to define them.  I have attempted to
arguie that the very abbreviated definitions given in the gismu list are
not adequate to define the words semantically enough to make the decisions
people seem to want to make now, suing English-language arguments.  They in
partcuilar seem to lead people to false paradigms of the 2.1 sort, and I am
trying to couynter that by mentioning the actual paradigms that I used when
coming up with the definitions.

The probably bottom line is that the Lojban word will end up having a vague
meaning that includes your definition as well as mine.  Since yours
is largely a restricted version of mine (all things that you could use djuno
for, I could also, but not the reverse), my definition is probably better
for the gismu, since (and Colin Fine has argued this better than I have)
it is better to have broad gismu and use lujvo to restrict and narrow their
definitions.

lojbab