No Subject

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

Subject: Re: biting the hand that feeds us?

The following is an expansion of a direct reply that I sent eric
yesterday to his comments on mine on his.

>You speak of `erroneous thinking' and the consequences of mass-termism
>as though the whole dispute were a sort of value-free intellectual
>bagatelle.  But it is not.  Consider Hitler and "Mr.  Jew" again ---
>carefully.  Unsanity kills.  Sometimes it kills millions.

Lojban semantics is and must be value-free, regardless of Hitler.  There
are no value universals that I know of.  Lojban is culturally
independent.

Other than the minimal categorization implicit in dividing the world
into relations representable as selbri, all selbri are grammatically
interchangable.  "Category error" is a concept of semantics, and we
adopt no semantic theory that divides selbri up other than is implicit
in the grammar.  If you can massify anything, you can massify
everything.  Human beings do sometimes massify (even general
semanticists), therefore we must allow all predicates to be massifiable.

I don't think you can blame mass-termism for Hitler.  He did not see Mr.
Jew (loi xebro prenu) he saw the stereotypical Jew (le'e xebro prenu).
In killing Mr. Jew, he was also killing Mr Human Being, except that of
course he decided that no Jew was a member of the human race.  I of
course feel that decision was erroneous, but his conclusions do
logically follow from his assumptions.  My conclusions also follow from
my assumptions about the world.  You can disagree with those
assumptions, but that is not fuzzy thinking, that is just a differing
world view.  My world view places a higher value on interdependency
than on independence, and mass concepts work better when you think
of human beings as ants in the human anthill, as I sometimes do.

Of course (in my world view) Mr Human (society) can decide that some
world-views are unacceptable morally, as has been done with Hitler by
most of the mass of human society (though not all).

Un-sanity is in the eye of the beholder.  Lojban promotes the expression
and hence the thinking about of nonsense.  Whether this leads to something
we will eventually find out.

I see a more important flaw in your reasoning.  YOu distinguish the human
condition as something special:
>Formally, your conclusion would not follow even if your premise were
>correct.  The simplest counterargument is to observe that human beings
>can dissolve their societies and form new ones, unlike brain cells.  The
>brain's behavioral repertoire is hugely more complicated than any
>individual cell's; by contrast, the repertoire of the emergent we call
>"society" is not very much more complicated than any individual human's
>(this has to be the case, otherwise humans could not maintain the mental
>model of their society that permits them to function in it).  There are
>many other arguments, but these should be sufficient.

The complexity of the mass is a finction of its size and diversity of
components.  You are merely saying that human beings are more alike in
their interactions and roles within society than cells are within us.
But complexity of a mass has nothing to do with whether statements
about masses are useful.

I also dare say that no human can drop out of loi remna, the mass of all
human society.

(I will agree with what Arthur Protin said, by the way, that the English
concept of 'society' is not usually "loi remna".  I personally never had
heard of 'society is hungry' until reading eric's posting.  On the other
hand, "society needs better housing" is a more common mass usage.)

The masses that are our bodies are not immutable.  Individual cells are
dropped out, and new cells are grown.  At a smaller level, component
chemicals are added and subtracted all the time.  I ate a piece of
turkey last night - that piece became a part of lai lojbab. the mass of
me, and ceased to be a part of the turkey (carcass).  Yet I still can
look in the refrigerator and point to this thing and say that is turkey.
The only thing 'unique' about humans is that they can move between
certain masses of their own conscious volition.  That is not a
justification for a different linguistic treatment of human beings in a
predicate language.  We can form masses just like other things.

Masses have their own logic, which is different from the logic of sets
and individuals.  Anything true for any component of a mass is true for
the whole mass.  This is useful in a lot of ways.  When a contracting
firm paints your house, actually only a few employees probably use a
paint brush.  The firm is a mass of some specific human beings (lei
remna instead of loi remna).  It is commonly said about person x that
"he likes people".  Well since x does not know every human being, and
indeed may not like every individual in the human race, we are saying
that "x like loi remna".

That this logic is different can be seen in noting that for a mass
concept of society, both of the following are probably true:  "Society
needs better housing".  "Society is sufficiently well housed."

The kind of mass that we most often use in English, is mass nouns.
Almost any statement you make about 'water', 'sugar', 'snow' is a
statement about those as masses.  The default quantifier of a mass is
"pisu'o loi broda" (at least a little of the mass).  If a predication
about the mass is true about the tiniest component of the mass, it is
true about the whole mass ('the TV is broken' usually means that one
chip has 'broken').  If one person is hungry, than the mass society is
hungry.

The 'weakness' of mass logic is that it ignores individual differences.
The strength is that it allows generalization.  It is a political and
philosophical issue, not a linguistic one, as to whether the differences
between individuals is an important consideration in any or every
situation.

Thinking further, I realize that if people clearly recognize the
distinctions between masses and sets and individuals, eric's 'unsanity'
does not apply.  It is the mixing of the logics that leads to many of the
'unsane' things eric would criticize.  If you try to make deductions about
things that are masses, thinking of them as individuals, or as sets, you
will get illogical results.

>"Is-a-part-of" is not "is"!

I can therefore agree with this.  But:

>However, the three forms imply three different presumptions about the
>metaphysics of universal statements.  To the extent that language
>conditions thought, they reinforce different presuppositions about the
>*kind* and *amount* of evidence required for generalization.

I have found that in speaking Lojban I seldom make universal statements.
The default quantifiers on "lo", and the mass descriptors are not
universals, and I am not prone to making statements about "all x's" or
about "all of the mass of", both of which take explicit quanitifcation
in Lojban.  Note also that massification and generalization are two
different things.  The latter in Lojban, as mentioned above, is
handled through "lo'e" and "le'e", not through the masses "loi", "lei",
and "lai".

>My claim is that the "mass term" presupposition is both a) formally
>bogus , (in the sense of making hash out of any attempt at deductive
>reasoning from it) and b) conducive to unsanity.  That is, it leads to
>unpredictive beliefs and bad behavioral choices.

By the way, in Lojban, "bad" has a place structure "x1 is bad for x2 by
standard x3".  Most general statements about things being 'bad' become
meaningless.  LIkewise, statements about truth and knowledge have a
place for epistemology.

lojbab