Re: Chief logician?

[Randall Holmes <holmes@DIAMOND.IDBSU.EDU>]

I'm quite aware that you have people who can discuss these problems
intelligently.  So do we.  There is a difference between doing this
explicitly and doing it implicitly and more or less automatically, as
one must in speaking a language.  You address the question of how this
goes on below, I see; I'm very interested in how the use of the
machinery works out in practice, but it seems that the answer is "No
one uses it"!

On people not making statements that involve quantificational
variables -- that's a practical measure of how well people have
mastered the machinery, I suppose :-)  Has anyone tried to speak or
write about mathematics in Lojban at a level where this becomes
unavoidable?

Expand your comment about "the raising of abstractions"; I think I
know what you are talking about (and that it is important) but I am
not sure I understand you.

The only genuinely alien languages you list among native languages of
Lojbanists are Chinese and Finnish.

On your comments about negation, I have problems with terminology, but
as far as I understand you I probably disagree flatly.  There is one
concept of negation (the propositional connective) and then there are
various other notions which NL's confuse with negation; I would hate
to think that you are importing NL confusions (more likely you are
defining these other notions precisely and using them correctly and
the only confusion is that you call them "negation" :-) ).  Explain by
example what you mean by "metalinguistic" negation.

Of course I understand how logical connectives applied to arguments
are eliminated!  The difficulty arises in expanding sentences when
there is more than one such "argument" in it, and an answer I received
seems to indicate that you have an official solution to this (good! --
so far as I know, TLI Loglan does not) but that it goes contrary to
the natural analogy with implicit quantification (not so good --
explained fully in another post)


                                       --Randall Holmes