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At 12:23 PM 1/6/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
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.
Natural language isn't logical, and the logic breakdown seems to be especially egregious in precisely the areas that concern you these days.
> 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.
Being logically precise about the specification is verbose.
> (hence what happens > when we try to explicate "only" or "just"). I don't know what you mean by these examples.
The logical expansion of English "only" is very long-winded, and I'm not sure we ever agreed on the logical expansion of English "just". Thus we added po'o as an abbreviation for the logical long-windedness.
> 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*?
It may be a pure logical form on its own, but it hides possibly-key logical structure, which could cause problems when things start interacting.
For example, we have a logical expansion for po'o. I am not sure what happens to that meaning when within a negation. I am quite sure that people won't consider what happens to that meaning, until someone does the analysis and calls them on it.
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
So you reject the Cowan doctrine about the price of infinite precision being infinite verbosity?
> 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).
In Lojban, if ro doesn't always mean logical quantifier ro, then we'll have trouble with Lojban being a logical language. Grice might get communication to proceed anyway, but it won't be logical communication.
> >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}.
I haven't thought about it, and am not awake enough to do so now.
"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.
I don't believe we have any predicates with quantifiers built into their meanings. Not to say that we couldn't...
> >"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.
I wrote it. Read the entry for piresi'e.pa lo re si'e is not an example of a si'e phrase, but is a sumti including the si'e phrase "resi'e"
resi'e if meaningful would have the place structure x1 is a 2(-some) portion of mass x2 lo resi'e refers to the x1 of that constructpa lo resi'e selects one out of however many such 2-some portions of the unstated x2 as may exist.
This is nonsense.
> >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.
In Lojban, we do not presume that all legal strings of words have defined meaning.
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.
John corrects me that we allow a quantifier on li. It is meaningless to say that it is "unquantified". If a quantifier can go there, then it is quantified. He says he specifies what the default quantifier is in CLL.
> 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?
I don't. But you can in fact put a quantifier there. So the question is what that quantifier is when it is ellipsized. These sorts of arguments on default quantifiers came from just the same sorts of efforts by earlier jboskeists to try to assign logical meanings to strings that were grammatical but not logically explicit. Some of those logical meanings were useful ones, so that we can say "lo broda" without having to say "su'o lo broda". The TLI Loglan equivalent lea is "ro lo" and I believe there is no provision to change the ro quantifier, though I think that lea is grammatically the same as "le" so that it grammatically allows an inner and outer quantifier in addition to the specified "ro" - no idea what quantifiers mean when used there. (I don't think that lea was designed as a "lo" with default quantifier "ro" but rather had the "ro" built in, but I chose to take it that way with pc's approval in implementing it as "lo".)
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