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Re: [jboske] more true (was: RE: Re: ka ka (was: Context Leapers)

In a message dated 10/4/2002 6:09:21 AM Central Daylight Time, a.rosta@hidden.email writes:

<<
you are suggesting that {ko'a clani} is a
proposition that is never wholly true. That may be right, but
I would also like to introduce a further example that sometimes
needs fuzzy values and sometimes doesn't.

1.  He is in the room.

If he is half in the room and half out, then he is sort of in
the room -- the truth value of "he is in the room" is between
pi no and pi ro. If he is entirely in the room, but only by a
few inches, then the truth value is pi ro, but nonetheless he
is barely in the room, and he is 'less in the room' than
someone standing further from the doorway.

>>
As usual here, it is important to distinguish between how true some claim is and how much the claim is ({jei} and {ni} in Lojban).  If the guy is only a few inches inside the door, it may be that it is absolutely true that he is inside the door and yet the quantity of his being inside is less than that for a may who is several yards inside the door.  The two can vary independently of one another -- or nearly so.

xorxes on &
<<
> I don't disagree with anything you've said (except that it needs
> to be clarified, IMO, that .9 entails "not (wholly) true").

It all depends on how you define NOT for continuous truth values.
A value of .9 is not a value of 1 just as it is not a value of .8.
But we probably want a softer "NOT" for continuous truth values.
For example, a function that maps value x to value 1-x.
Then {.9 <bridi>} does not entail {not 1 <bridi>} = {0 <bridi>}.
>>
If we are off in open-ended truth, which begins at 1 and goes on, the negation is going to be trickier than this supposes.  On this view, tv .9 is absolutely not truth, [1+, but it is not falsehood either and it is closer to truth than to falsehood, [0- .  Your proposal is Boolean, but that won't work here.

<<
I would say almost any proposition is susceptible
of both treatments. {ko'a clani} can also be seen as a yes/no
proposition in some contexts. I'm saying that whichever kind
of modifier we use determines how we're treating the proposition
for the purposes of truth evaluation.
>>
Nothing in Lojban forces any particular evaluation system for truth (well, {jetnu} and {jitfa} might unless handled very carefully).  Barring the use of fairly specific comments, what system is intended for a particular sentence is not clear.  Certainly the use of functions does not help explicitly.  But {ja'axipinopa} or the like would restrict the choices considerably.