Re: Carterian formula (was: Gricean formula?)

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@quetzal.com>]

>Jim Carter writes (quoted by Chris Bogart):
>> In a dictionary words are defined in one or two sentences, but for
>> guaspi these sentences are considered to be merely a learning aid.
>> The effective definition is a set of lists of thus-related referents.

John Cowan replies:
>This definition doesn't work for Lojban/Loglan, and in fact I have suggested
>to Carter that it is buggy in general (see the file "cowan" in the guaspi
>directory on www.math.ucla.edu).  "x1 has a heart" and "x1 has kidneys" have
>the same referent sets (neglecting partly dissected animals, etc.).  But we
>don't want to call them the same predicate.

I don't understand why you think it's useful to neglect animals with a heart
.onai a kidney.  Can you come up with a "minimal pair" of sentences that
might exist in a language, differing only in their use of predicates meaning
"x1 has a heart" and "x1 has kidneys", *without* relying on dissection,
organ transplants, unusual species, etc?  How about a pair of sentences
using two predicates whose referent sets are guaranteed to be the same?
(i.e. "x1 has skin", "x1 has a skin color")

>> When you speak  an  argument  in  a nonsentence you call the
>> listener's attention to its referents.  For example,

>The second half of this works all right for Lojban/Loglan, but the first half
>applies only to Loglan and -gua!spi, since the Lojban form for "A rat!" is not
>"lo ratcu"/"pa ratcu" but simply "ratcu".  (In Loglan, that's an imperative,
>and in -gua!spi I don't know what it is.)

Agreed.  But what *does* "lo ratcu" mean in Lojban, all by itself?

>> A guaspi sentence or argument expresses a relation between specific
>> referents, and this specific referent set member is called an ``event''.
>> (Frequently the sentence represents several similar events.)

>I don't know whether Lo??an can accept this definition or not.

Me neither.  I just liked it because it was more formal than my previous
very muddy conception of an "event", and it gave me something concrete to
think about.  I hope that once the logical questions about lojban are
answered that they'll be something I'm able to grasp as well as I do
guaspi's logical underpinnings.  It hadn't even occurred to me before that
lojban's "events" might defined any more concretely than by reference to the
very fuzzy English word "event".

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