Re: [engelang] Xorban: la je cmla nltra - engelang messages

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 23, 2012 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: la je cmla nltra

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 12:29 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

On Oct 22, 2012, at 11:46 PM, "Mike S." <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 22, 2012 at 10:20 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com" target="_blank" href="mailto:maikxlx@gmail.com">maikxlx@gmail.com>

I think predicates for the deictics are desirable, but I want to think more about "dz" before I reply here.

But deictics are among the least likely things to have predicates for them in natural languages; they are regularly "pronouns". They are pragmatically defined (like personal pronouns -- at least first and second) and have no semantic content per se.

Somewhat true re deicitic predicates, though you do have interesting periphrasis like "He is I". In Xorban, 90%+ of the time, when a speaker wants to say "me", he'll say "a'a", and "a'a" isn't a predicate. "la'a mba'a" is usually the implicit binding of the first person entity, but it can be made explicit when you really want to emphasize "me" (like Japanese "watashi"). I find your suggestion that pragmatically defined things "have semantic no content per se" incomprehensible. Of course "me" has semantic content -- it refers exactly to the person uttering the sentence. That's perfectly meaningful.

"meaningful" isn't the same as "has semantic content". The identity of the referent of "I" is fixed contextually, pragmatically, not semantically, but is perfectly meaningful.

I guess it depends how you look at it. I see the discourse structure as a necessary part of the model, and therefore I see myself(x) = speaker-of-this-sentence(x), as a perfectly valid predicate with a perfectly sensible model-theoretical semantic value just like cat(x).

OK, that'll work, though it is a non-standard division of labor. I can imagine ways to fit deictics in there as well.

I don't think that building L "ka" into an argument place builds significant stuff into it, because I don't think that "ka" signifies much at all. "Lo broda" and "lo ka broda" are essentially two interchangeable ways of looking at the same thing, and although Lojban has this distinction all over the place, it's trivial to switch back and forth: "lo ckaji be lo ka broda" = "lo broda" and "lo se ckaji be lo broda" = "lo ka broda", or am I mistaken?

The fact that one can shift expressions around in this was does not mean that something different is not involved. The sorts of things that characterize are not the same sorts of things that they characterize. Rats are concrete physical objects, ratness is not any of those things, and ratnessness is even less so. There are connections (and just what those are has driven philosophers to various kinds of madness for two and a half millennia). You can say pretty much anything you want to say about rats in terms of ratness, though it looks pretty strange. It is harder to say things about ratness (either kind) in terms of rats. A good case can almost be made for just doing without ratness (etc.), but, alas, in some intensional contexts, only ratness seems to do the sort of work needed. To be sure, we can find dodges around actually saying "ratness" or some equivalent term, but we end up using the notion all the same -- just hiding the fact behind idioms of one sort or another -- which will have to be decoded in the semantics anyhow.

I would get rid of "ratness" if nothing else seemed to work. And let's not even speak of "ratnessness", which I would burn with fire, because it has no useful meaning for human speakers nor even for human philosophers, and therefore bears no consideration in the engineering of a speakable loglang. Montague realized that intensions of intentions are all constants, and therefore useless in his program. It's elephants all the way down, when it comes to "higher order intensions/properties". Plato would have probably said the same thing; he didn't talk of forms of forms, just of forms. Right? One degree of abstraction, if needed at all, is more than enough. And often it isn't needed. Often "ka" is not needed. So why force it on Xorban.

Do you mean "unless nothing else seemed to work"?
What?! No use for justice, beauty, or truth? Nothing that blue jeans have in common with blueberries? Prettier have their uses, even without going into intensional contexts. As for philosophers, NEVER say something is beyond use for them (in my aborted dissertation, I got up to fierinessnessness and smokeynessness by page ten or so).

Very well. The last thing that I would wish to do is impede one's ability to refer to "fierinessnessness", regardless of how useless that concept may appear to be. So if we imported "km" [kam < ka] as "x1 is a property of being x2". Then you could say something like "la lo fgro li kmiko le kmeki kmake" or "la fgrykmykmykma" for short.

Well, I wasn't proposing a predicate maker of that sort, of course, and certainly not a predicate that makes no sense as this one does (we already have an "is characteristic of" if you want to work with classes). The idea is, of course, to get away from classes to say something else (like why things were in those classes in the first place -- this predicate is bassackward). The logic I was working with used properties and properties of these and so on up with great skill and precision and to devastating effect. Too bad it is almost all still in Sanskrit.

Much less would I wish to impede one's ability to speak about justice, beauty, or truth, of course. Nevertheless, I would have to see a better case than I have seen so far for making "km" obligatory for saying ordinary things like "the fire is too hot" i.e.

Do you recognize that we need properties to talk about beauty, truth and justice? Aren't they enough?

la fgra le glre dksake.
versus
la fgra le li glri kmeki dksake.

It is you, not I that have created these monsters of imprecision, "The fire is extreme among the hot things", e.g., not me. Saying that it is an extreme in a scalar property (or, indeed, as Xorxes points out, beyond a certain limit -- though the predicate doesn't say that) is certainly better than that (and btw would just have a predicate maker, not this strange predicate) . One would like to just say that it is too hot -- adverb-adjective, but you have set things up to make that impossible, just as we can talk about a green house in any ordinary way. These kinds of primitive bad decisions are the sort of thing that should get caught early and corrected, not defended in the face of obvious difficulties. God help us if we try to change the phonology.

Richard's properties (modal) are useful for many things, but are not the last word. As normal cases like "If rats were insects" show, the extension of "rat" in some worlds may contain no rats(as we understand them), which hardly seems right for properties. (A consequence of this mechanism is Goodman's "This is the best of all possible worlds because it *is* all possible worlds") Plato is not a very good case, since, as Aristotle and others before him noted, his system is classically incomplete and entails (unacknowledged, of course) that there is at least a Form of forms? Properties are often not necessary, but also often are. And remember that, given properties, individuals can be eliminated -- but not conversely.

I can't say too much about what a form of forms might be, but I can say that in Montague Semantics, a property is simply a function from worlds to a one-place predicates, which is covered by X "l-" as long as intensional readings are admitted. I believe that "km" would be either redundant or an encumbrance in ordinary Xorban.

My point is just that Richard, dear man that he was, is not Frege nor Church and his notion of properties is defective in just that way. They work for a lot of things, they don't work for a lot of others. I am not clear what you mean by intensional readings of l but I have come to expect some strange sort of misuse of at least terminology, if not of fact, when you talk this way. Do read up a bit, please, this stuff has been worked over for years.
--
co ma'a mke

Xorban blog: Xorban.wordpress.com
My LL blog: Loglang.wordpress.com