[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 07:23:04PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> Here's why I had preferred nonimporting ro:
> First, I wanted to be able to say {ro pavyseljirna cu blabi} without
> having to claim that you can go out and find unicorns, and without
> having to rephrase to {ro da ga na pavyseljirna gi blabi}.
Why would you want to say that? Since there's no unicorns, any
statement about all of them is pretty boring. I can say {ro
pavyseljirna cu xekri} and be correct also.
The claim you're actually wanting uses some sort of a generic, and
I guess if ro isn't importing {lo'e} would work (if it is importing,
however, because lo'i ro pavyseljirna would be empty, and the inner
quantifier on lo'e is ro also, I don't think it would work).
I think this discussion is pretty seperate from realistic discussion
of unicorns.
> Second, I wanted De Morgan to work. De Morgan with importing ro
> fails precsisely when the quantified set is empty.
That is pretty lame. I don't think we want naku rules to "sometimes
work".
> But I think we were wrong that this meant that we sorely need
> nonimporting ro.
>
> Let's take the unicorn case first. I want to be able to say
> {ro pavyseljirna cu blabi}. But I also want to be able to say
> {su'o pavyseljirna cu blabi} and {su'o pavyseljirna cu nakni}.
> But there's no dispute about the importingness of su'o. So it
> turns out that when I want to talk about unicorns I'm
> talking about a nonempty set of things that are unicorns in
> a world where unicorns exist.
You want generics again, I think. Probably le'e?
If not there's nothing to prevent you from claiming {lu'a pi PA
lo'i pavyseljirna cu broda} for any PA or any broda, and being
perfectly correct.
Of course, Lojban doesn't prevent us from lying, no? For example,
if you were telling a story to child about unicorns, I'd expect you
would use su'o and such and lead the poor kid to believe they're
actually real.
[...]
> To summarize:
> I see no practical reasons (usage, sayability) why ro shouldn't
> be importing.
Well there is the usage of lo'i broda, where it is the empty set.
But I'm guessing you want to include possible unicorns also.
There's another more sinister problem with this: it makes *all*
universal claims false. Because for anything of the form where in
this world Ax(Gx -> Fx), we can make another state of afairs where
there's another Gx which isn't Fx. If you want Ax to iterate over
the possible values which aren't even in the current universe, I
think it's more destructive to the logical system than our inconsistency
with De Morgan.
> The ro = 100% argument gives a principled reason why ro should
> be importing.
But ro *isn't* 100%, pa is. 100% == 100/100 == 1.
> The fact that we want to say true things about {su'o pavyseljirna}
> means that nonimporting ro wouldn't make our problems go away.
I don't think we want to say such things except when lying (which
is a perfectly legitimate application of the language).
--
Jordan DeLong - fracture@hidden.email
lu zo'o loi censa bakni cu terzba le zaltapla poi xagrai li'u
sei la mark. tuen. cusku
Attachment:
binWP8aXfjUMl.bin
Description: application/ygp-stripped