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Lojbab:
> 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.
By what criteria? Natural language works as I describe.
> Logical precision is overly simplistic and what people want to
> say seldom matches what is easy to express logically
I think you misunderstand what logic is. To take your example of
the drum with petrol in, there is no logical impediment to specifying
that no relevant amount of petrol is in the drum, or to specifying
what criteria determine a relevant amount. The impediment is the
verbosity that is required, and the excessive effort, in specifying
these things. This has nothing to do with logic, and the failure
to apprehend this has long impaired the quality of jboskological
thinking.
> (hence what happens
> when we try to explicate "only" or "just").
I don't know what you mean by these examples.
> 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).
I'm not sure what you mean by "abbreviation" versus "pure logical
form". If the abbreviation is equivalent to the unabbreviated
counterpart, then the abbreviation is as much a pure logical form
as the unabbreviated. If the abbreviation is not equivalent, then
in what sense is it an *abbreviation*? Perhaps you mean not so
much that is is shorter -- for it is perfectly possible to have
pure logical forms that are abbreviated but equivalent to longer
forms -- but that it is vaguer. In that case, i am all in favour
of vagueness as an option, but I object to the mistaken notion
that brevity requires vagueness and logical precision requires
verbosity and likewise that in talking about empty petrol drums
we need to fall back on vagueness instead of on Grice.
> Thus, people do NOT say "all" unless they really mean
> logical "all", without a single exception
The words _every_ and _ro_ mean logical all, but when uttering a
sentence that contains them, the speaker may mean anything,
constrained only by Gricean principles (which rule out no
interpretation tout court). The advantage of a logical language
compared to a natural language simply is that it is more feasible,
in matters of logical meaning, to say what one means.
> > > 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.
Can you think of cases where these word give different defaults?
Since {me'i ro} is the most sensible reading for {me'i mo'e zo'e}
(i.e. bare {me'i}, it stands to reason that usage unbiased by any
silly prescribed defaults would tend to interpret {me'i mo'e zo'e}
as {me'i ro}.
> 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"
That's what "default" means to you. It's not what it currently means
in Lojban. But I am not unsympathetic to the BF deciding to change
the prescription to reflect your understanding, and deleting the
defaults from the prescription. But one consequence of that is that
elliptizability becomes de facto impossible in many cases, since it
would rarely be possible to glork from context whether, say, {su'o}
or {ro} was intended. People don't interpret bare {lo} as {su'o lo}
because they glork it from context; they do so because that's the
prescribed default. Nobody ever glorks it as {ro lo}.
> > > 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/444443
>
> If "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
This *is* pragmatics. The relevant branch of pragmatics is the one
concerned with how we get from sentence meaning to utterance interpretation.
Knowing context and common sense is a factor in that process.
> > > 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
"lo xunre" is red, "lo blanu" is blue. Those are predicate-specific
properties -- they follow from the definitions of xunre and blanu.
Likewise, if a predicate means "drink all of" or "touch some of",
then "all of" and "some of" are predicate-specific properties.
> > > > > >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
Read the ma'oste (entry for si'e) and you will understand. In learning
Lojban it is important that you should read the ma'oste.
> 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".
It's still a meaningful question, because a sentence has to mean
something -- it's not a meaningless string of words. So the question
is, when you interpret a sentence containing "li", what is by default
the quantifier on li? The answer, I would hope, is that it is unquantified.
> 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
And what do they mean? You don't say. Until you've answered that, and
justified your answer convincingly, we can't proceed to the next step.
> We look at an example sentence using no quantifier:
>
> lo'i broda se cmima vo da
> to see what it means, and we find that the outer quantifier must default to
> either "ro" or "piro".
In all the usage of it that I have encountered, the outer quantifier
is {mo'e zi'o}.
> 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
Why would you not use {mo'e zi'o}? Why do you insist on quantification?
> 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
It's not logically the same either, by some construals of lo'i
(according to which, lo'i has an intension).
--And.