[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
For several weeks now I have been reading what strike me as stranger and stranger claims about Xorban. This leads me to wonder if they seem strange to me simply because I have misunderstood what Xorban is about. So I have decided to say what I have taken the project to be and what I understand that to entail. I hope this will lead someone to say where I have misled myself about what the project is up to or what it is taken to involve.
Is it likely that there exists among your fellow xorbanists some tacit consensus of purpose of which you are unaware? I don't think so.
A loglan is a language readily usable by humans -- as opposed to by, for pertinent examples, machines and Vulcans -- which displays unequivocally the logical form of the utterances made in it. The display need not be transparent, the form immediately perceivable, but the discovery process must have a unique (and correct) product for each utterance, and must be one that a normal person could carry out in a reasonable time. The logical form is defined by formulae in a developed logical language. JCB, who was not actually building a loglang for all that happened later to his project, chose FOPL, which, to be fair, was about all that was available to him. Since that time, many more systems have been developed (the current edition of the Handbook of Philosophical Logic runs to over 6,000 pages and many items are mentioned only in bibliographic notes) to cover logically significant matters that FOPL does not. There are also many not logically significant utterances which are vital to language but which have not place in logical systems. JCB dealt with new items that came to his attention by either working them into the syntax of the underlying logical system or by slapping them onto his language ad hoc. In this he was on the right track, since most of the later logical systems have developed their languages by expanding syntactic categories in FOPL or by just adding stuff on to it, with rules to explain where it fits in. So, now, starting a loglang, we can take a logical system that covers all we thing it should cover (which probably means about as broad a system -- or rather set of systems, since no one system covers all of language usage -- as possible). I suppose that this is an intensional logic with added pieces for questions and commands, for various other speech acts, and for epistemic and deontic structures (at least -- but these may be within the predicate structure), and presumably a little set theory (C and L). As noted, we could start from FOPL and build, but the results are likely to be chaotic (Loglan and Lojban, e.g.) in various areas. I take the Xorban project to be to build a loglang better than Loglan or Lojban (or gua/spi, for all I know).
As for the above, my answer is "Yes sort of, but". For me (& I know others such as Mike and Martin and you don't share my view), the loglang should unambiguously encode *logical form* but needn't engage with logics, where by logics I mean ways of formally modelling the world in order to make it possible to state propositions about the world. By logical form, I mean the relations between operator and variable and between predicate and argument: I mean that not as a definition but as a rational claim that all formulae are fashioned from these elements, and if I'm wrong in this claim I'd be delighted to be shown where I err. I have very much not read any of the 6000 pages of the handbook of philosophical logic, but I suppose them to be about logics rather than logical form. I'm not saying that semantics doesn't matter -- only that the formal part of the lg, and the part that makes it a loglang, doesn't extend into semantics. --And.