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Nick:
> Sent: 14 December 2002 05:19
so it's a bit out of date now, it now being 16 December...
> We are quickly heading for a solomontean solution to lo'e . Before we
> get there though:
>
> 1. If there is no constraint on any squinting of lo'e being done in a
> way *representative* of the population, but is wholly at the discretion
> of the speaker, nothing stops them from making a singularisation like
> "take only the Americans I've actually met, and exaggerate all their
> traits I dislike". In effect, lo'e merko can mean the same thing as
> le'e merko in the right context
>
> On his current gap-filling bender :-) , And would rejoice in this,
> since that is in fact his understanding of le vs. lo in general: that
> le, being specific, is a particular instance of lo
>
> Two retorts. One, the definition has been 'typical' vs.
> 'stereotypical'. People regard these as disjoint, rather than le'e a
> subclass of lo'e. (And enough people have made this complaint that it
> is, IMO, the majority understanding of the issue, which any eventual
> solution must encompass.)
Quick answer. 'Typical' is explicable as a quick or nontechnical gloss
for 'generic'. 'Stereotypical' can be explained either as a gloss of
desperation or as a result of a demonstrably incorrect analysis of
le'e. (Incorrect if paradigmatic regularity is presumed.) Neither have
enough usage by people other than xorxes (& perhaps even me, incredibly
enough) to be considered entrenched.
> Two, le isn't just +specific, it's also -veridical. I think this is
> being ignored wrongly. le is not truly a subclass of lo
I addressed this earlier today in a reply to xod, who made the same
point.
> 2. And pleads for Trobriander logicians, and why should anything we say
> about {lo'e gerko} = Mr Dog be based on individuals, rather than
> allowing Mr Dog to be the basic concept
>
> I say this is bogus. Lojban propagandises about minimising metaphysical
> constraints, but the whole point of the Loglan exercise has been to
> insert a *humungous* metaphysical constraint in the works: the
> machinery of Western logic.
As I said in another reply to you, I believe that the basics of logic
are not western but universal. I don't even think they're species-
specific, let alone culture-specific. What's Western is the formalization
of logic. But you get logical stuff in every language, regardless of
the culture. Logic is more fundamental than culture.
> That's why we have masses and sets, and most languages don't.
I've never heard of a language with anything like Lojban's set
gadri, but I believe that collectives (i.e. masses) are not
uncommon. I'm not speaking from any great expertise here, I hasten
to add.
> Anyone speaking Lojban has to deal with what an
> indivudual, a mass, and a set are. If the Trobrianders can come up with
> a logic that admits of Mr Dog but still has sensible things to say
> about masses and sets, fine. But since Western predicate logic *is*
> based on the individuals (there are only entities and predicates in
> model-theoretic semantics), I don't think we have anything to apologise
> for here
There isn't anything different between Trobriander and Western logic.
Both will need both (a) predicates and (b) a way to handle individuals
like London, Nelson Mandela, Nick, etc. The only difference is that
some things that Westerners treat as (a), the Trobrianders treat as
(b).
(I have never read Malinowski. The ascription to Trobrianders is of
course hypothetical here.)
> Don't listen to the propaganda. Lojban has a huge cultural biases
> squarely embedded in it, on purpose. It just claims to minimise the
> rest.
I'm okay with that. It can have biases by virtue of the defaults
it chooses, but it shouldn't be so biased as to exclude rational
alternatives.
> (And JCB, as pc has reported, probably naively thought that
> Western logic was objective and unbiased and didn't really force a
> particular way of doing things anyway, because its premisses are
> "self-evident". Yeah, self-evident to Westerners, because of a neat
> chicken-and-egg effect: Classical notions of logic do underly how
> Westerners regard the universe.)
I must be similarly naive... But of course I don't think I am naive.
--And.