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Xod: > On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > > Xod: > > > On Wed, 23 Oct 2002, And Rosta wrote: > > > > > > > But only two Lojbanists have come > > > > up with sustained and relatively coherent (-- coherent enough > > > > to be debated, at least) explicit accounts of these gadri -- Jorge > > > > and me > > > > > > That's right. The rest of us are using them and understanding each other > > > perfectly well > > > > IMO, a basic premise of jboske is that whether people use x and > > understand each other perfectly well is largely irrelevant to jboske > > We know from the study of natlang that ordinary people have no trouble > > understanding each other even when what they say is very different > > from what they mean. (People with impaired theory-of-mind faculties, > > e.g. autistics, are less good at this, because the ability heavily > > replies on being able to guess how the other person thinks.) So > > being understood is not relevant to the question of "what does this > > sentence mean?" > > You seem to be implying here that meaning exists outside of the two people > engaging in communication Absolutely I am. John and I have been having a coldwar sort of argument about this for years, each of us thinking the other insane. First of all, I see language (or 'grammar' in the sense of the rule system of the language -- 'langue' in the Saussurean sense) as a code. If I want to communicate idea X to you, I don't necessarily have to utter a sentence that encodes X. I can utter a sentence that encodes Y, such that I am confident that from Y you will infer X. How is the code determined? For natlangs, we define the meaning of a sentence as that element of meaning that is constant across contexts -- across multiple utterances of the sentence. For Lojban, though, we work it out deductively from general principles (such as the principle that the language is consistent, regular, unambiguous, etc., that scope is left to right, etc. etc.). As before, I acknowledge that Naturalists can quite legitimately take an entirely contrary view, but in their pure forms, Naturalist Lojban and Lojbanologist Lojban are different languages. Each school chooses to heed the other as and when they feel it appropriate. --And.