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John E Clifford, On 27/10/2012 18:07:
*From:* And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> 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.
John:
I guess I don't see the distinction you are making very clearly. So you mean by "logics" particular theories about what entities (or sorts of entities) there are and how they interact (i.e, what is ordinarily called metaphysics and in Lojban epistemology)?
I mean tense logic, mereological logic, and so forth.
If so, then I pretty much agree that that ids not very much of our business, except as it is a way of seeing that a language "needs" certain sorts of predicates and arguments (or some other means to deal with the situations involved). I take it the what I mean by logical form, the representation in a formal logical language, is precisely a reasonably efficient way to present this in a systematic way (for theory, not for practice, of course) with all the issues taken care of in advance by the choice of logical language.
I agree the project should consider what predicates are necessary for talking about tense, about colour, about meals, about force dynamics, and everything else, prioritizing the most important and most fundamental. I don't agree that they have to be highly formalized. But my crucial point is that I don't see this as part of loglanghood (i.e. what makes a loglang a loglang), tho there's more to any actual usable loglang than its loglanghood. I was saying this in response to your question about what your interlocutors see as being the goals of Xorban. --And.