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At 03:58 PM 1/5/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >If you drink a glass of water, then there is none left once you > >have drunk it. What qualifies as 'none left' is determined by > >ordinary criteria of relevance > > Correct, but LOGIC is orthogonal to pragmatics. When one is being > hyperlogical, one is ignoring pragmatics. All means ALL, not almost > all. This is a warped notion of hyperlogicality. All means all, not almost all -- that is a matter of logic/semantics. But whether "all of" can describe something short of "every molecule of" is a matter of pragmatics. This sort of confused inability to distinguish logic and pragmatics has hampered Lojban for too long and led to silly notions like the idea that logical precision adds complexity and hence should add verbosity.
Backwards. Logical precision is overly simplistic and what people want to say seldom matches what is easy to express logically (hence what happens when we try to explicate "only" or "just"). Therefore we add short forms for what people want to say as abbreviations for logical formulations, leaving the pure logical forms there (though seldom used in conversation). Thus, people do NOT say "all" unless they really mean logical "all", without a single exception.
> This is why I introduced da'a (which BTW I think should be used> instead of me'iro, which flashed by my screen in the last couple of days in> some context). The general opinion, which I share, is that the standard {pa} default is useful for {da'a} (e.g. giving 'penultimate'), while {ro} is the most sensible default for {me'i}.
It is not what is a "sensible" default that matters. "Default" refers to the value that pragmatically will occur most often when the number is used elliptically. In some cases (as the su'o in su'olo) we can specify a default that encompasses the whole field of plausible values (I haven't heard a plausible context where "lo" would be interpreted "nolo"), so saying the default is "su'o helps convey the meaning and usage of "lo".
The only time when da'a should be assumed to have the default da'apa is when there is no context that suggests a different value (which may or may not be often). "Default" means "first guess" not "actual meaning".
> People including logician considered a superlative to mean> "more than ro" and this is logically impossible since nothing is more broda> than itself. Pragmatics (and all natural language) understands this, but > it is logically wrong I don't know what you mean. It sounds like nonsense. What are the grounds for analysing superlatives as "more than ro"?
I'd have to dig up the reference the hard way. This was ancient history before Lojban went Internet, though there might be some earlier discussion.
> Invoking Whorf, if I say that noda poi jelca is in the drum, then that > really means NOda, and lighting a match should be safe I can't see any grounds for invoking Whorf here; it seems to have nothing to do with Whorf. Instead, you should invoke Grice and do a bit of inferncing before lighting the match.
The Whorf reference is explained better here: http://www.xrefer.com/entry/444443If "empty" means noda poi jelca cu nenru, then tossing a match into an empty gas can will not cause an explosion. But in fact an empty gas can will still cause an explosion, so therefore it isn't really empty. Pragmatics does NOT work in English in that situation - it has to rely on people knowing enough context and common sense that the word "empty" means something other than what it really means.
> Predicate logic demands that any "predicate-specific properties" be handled > by the place structures, so as to be transparent at the meta level that the> logic and grammar are operating. An operation on a predicate should work > the same way regardless of what the predicate means Again, I have no idea what you mean.
"lo" is an operator on broda that produces a phrase "lo broda". The meaning of "lo broda" should be determined from "broda" in the same way for all values of broda. It is not different if broda is nounlike, verblike, countable, always singular.
> > > >Your reasoning is based on (a) deliberately failing to distinguish
> > > >the mass from part of the mass, and (b) taking {pi ro} to mean
> > > >"every part of", which we have already agreed to be error
> > >
> > > Why? If it doesn't mean every, then use pida'a
> >
> >Does pimu mean "1 part in every 2 of", or "a half of"?
>
> In base ten it means ".5 of" which is either of those (I'm not sure I see
> the difference)
"pa lo re si'e" would be a continuous half, such as is found in a
tin of apricot halves.
Huh? "pa lo re si'e means nothing to me, since I have trouble contemplating a si'e greater than 1.
pa lo re boi pimusi'e would be "one of the two half-portions".
Reading "pimu" as "1 part in every 2 (same-sized) parts of" makes me find piPA more useful, so I don't want to argue against it.
That is implicit in the mathematical definition of fractions. .5 (decimal) means 5 parts in every 10.
What are the default quantifiers for li, lo'i, le'i, lu, zo?
Not a meaningful question for some of these, as there is no grammatical form "mu li tu'o". For le'i and lo'i it is a meaningful question, which is determined by examining all potential usages of the form "PA le'i broda" to see which one occurs most often, and hence is the one that one can assume in trying to quantify the sumti (which logicians seem to want to do, which is why the default quantifier tends to turn into a logic discussion).
We look at some possible values and see what they mean no lo'i broda su'o lo'i broda pa lo'i broda da'a lo'i broda ro lo'i broda pisu'o lo'i broda piro lo'i broda We look at an example sentence using no quantifier: lo'i broda se cmima vo dato see what it means, and we find that the outer quantifier must default to either "ro" or "piro". Since I've never actually seen an outside-quantifier usage on lo'i, I can't say which of these holds more meaning, which makes the decision rather arbitrary.
If John is right and we can use set descriptions for collections, the the answer may be different. I would be inclined to use "piro" on lo'i and ro on le'i, but if something other than this was said in CLL, I wouldn't likely argue.
The value for the inner quantifier depends on how you want statements about different forms of the empty set to be interpreted - thus probably either su'o or su'ono or ro.
A faster-than-light spaceship is not the same as a purple unicorn, so the quantifier on "lo" must exclude the empty set. The set of faster-than-light spaceships is logically the same as the set of purple unicorns, but I am not sure if it is pragmatically the same.
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org