Re: Lojban duplications

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!pucc.princeton.edu!91909372>]

Arthur Protin:
>
>     Every message (a unit of communication) contains countless
> "meta-messages" on an endless variety of topics.  For example,
> that first sentence includes: "I am alive", "this conversation
> is in English", "I want you to change your view of things", etc.

Yes, BUT you need to be very careful what you mean by 'contains',
'includes' - these are not the same as 'implies'. Pragmaticists
distinguish 'implication' (logical or material) from 'implicature' -
which is saying something like "in the social or other environment we
have in common I am inviting you to conclude the following", but which
can for example be explicitly overridden with no contradiction. I would
suggest that 'I am alive' and 'I want you to change your view of things'
are at best implicatures, and 'this conversation is in English' is a
meta-statement that cannot be regarded as implied by the original in any
sensible way.
        These distinctions are not just pedantry, but I rather think
point to a resolution to this argument. I suggest (using traditional
terminaology because I haven't learnt the Lojban terms yet) that:

Using an explicit argument or prepositional phrase ASSERTS that the
relation holds that is expressed by that argument place or preposition, and
IMPLICATES that the following argument is the kind of object etc which
normally holds such a relation;

Leaving out a positional argument or a prepositional phrase IMPLICATES
that there is a suitable, but unexpressed argument; but such implicature
may be overridden by a more general implicature that the semantics of
the predicate do not allow for such an argument.

> And just as the null action is an action, so too the null message
> is a message and the elipsed place is a place.  When I don't
> say where I am going it is because I feel that the express
> conveys my intent better without it.  It may not exist, I may
> expect you to already know it, I may want to keep it a secret,
> I may be getting forgetful in my old age.

I think you are putting too much intention in here. There are
circumstances, certainly, in which we choose every word with care, but
many utterances are not thought out so precisely. There is a sense in
which what you say is true, to be sure, but I think that it is often a
trivial sense.

>     Clearly, anything that could have been hung on there, that
> was not hung there, was not hung there for a reason! Just as any
> places that were unfilled were unfilled for a reason.  And since
> we have evolved to the point that we find we need to add places
> to the relations (bridi) that are not part of the stock definition,
> we should see that the expressed relations are only an approximation
> to what we really are thinking and talking about.  As such, I
> find the distinction between "klama" and "litru" very arbitrary,
> undesirable, and misleading.

In spite of what I have said above, I agree with you here.

        Kolen Fain

(c.j.fine@bradford.ac.uk)