fur muzzles

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

I remember the discussions about comparative-basic gismu somewhat
differently from Lojbab, so my residual ill-will was directed not at him
but at a group of people who, in the discussion, could not get beyond the
English (etc.) surface forms to the deeper princples or who (shades of
current topics) could not see the perceptual (better than "subjective")
side of "average" (say) for the mathematical.  However, if Lojbab's report
of the argument that finally convinced him to give up the good stuff is
correct, I'll be happy to include him.  Reducing positive blanu to more
blue than lo'e blanu is either infinitely regressive (bluer than the
typical thing that is bluer than the typical thing that is bluer than...)
or is viciously circular, specifying a new member of a class by a
definition that assumes that the class is already complete.  It is also,
of course, irrelevant, since calling a broda blanu (or talking about a
blanu broda) always referred not to lo'e blanu but to lo'e broda (and
average with respect to color, at that).

JCB had a nack for picking lousy examples and setting his case for these
gismu on a color word may have been another instance.  (But it does
seem that all the talk about standard colors rather than comparisons is
about answers to the question "What is this color?" rather than "What
color is this object?"  And even then, the process seems to me to be as
plausibly reconstructed as a comparison -- more like standard blue than
like standard aqua.  As plausibly, at least, as any metrical or ordinal
reconstruction of simple"tall" judgments.)  He might have done better
with "tall."  But he had another problem, since he had set in stone that
the missing arguments were all particularly bound variables,
"something"s.  So one good thing that did come out of the comparative-
gismu discussion (and some others) was the Lojban (I think Loglan
caught up eventually) rule that the missing arguments on a predicate are
to be taken as conventionally or cooperatively defined for the context.

In the same way, my comments about "fuzzifying proselytizers" or whatever
was aimed more at some of the real pros, Kosko in particular.  However, if
he wants it, the shoe fits smoothly on stivn's foot.  He does not,
admittedly, say that the dictionary contradicts (or even is contrary to)
pitr's claim, he just says that he uses the dictionary to "correct"  pitr.
A fairly fuzzy distinction, I think.  But before you protest that that is
not fuzzy, notice that, in stivn's usage, anything is or can be fuzzy.  He
keeps, for example, talking about various ordinal scales as fuzzy, without
giving any evidence that they are and, indeed, even after defining the one
for tallness (not directly related, notice, to "is tall") in metrical
terms (between n and m centimetres high) as well as giving them common
labels ("very tall," "rather tall," "quite tall,"  and so on).  Then, to
back this up (or because presupposing it to be true) he takes this ordinal
scale and starts using it as though it were a ratio scale, taking 3/4 as
.75 rather than in the 3 category of a (?)1-4 ordinal scale.  In any case,
nothing about ordinality (or any of the other Guttman types) is inherently
fuzzy, though you can fuzzify any of them in some way -- differently for
the different types, I would think.

So back to the basic point. An awful lot of terms are not at all fuzzy,
even if there are occasional hard cases about whether they apply.  For
some of these it may be useful in some discipline to introduce various
scales corresponding to these concepts in that informal way that
technical terms do correspond to natural ones and it may also prove to
be useful for some of these scales to have fuzzy components or even be
entirely (at the ratio level) fuzzy.  None of this affects what the original
term meant at home but is about some other term with a different home.
It may even be that the new term tells us interesting things about the old
term, that a fuzzy "tall" enables us to produce an intelligent system that
reproduces people's judgments of tallness with high accuracy and allows
us (as formal logic does for arguments) to have good reasons for
decisions in hard cases.  That still does not mean that the technical term
(and its apparatus) have hit on the real meaning of the natural term; we
can disagree with the machine's judgment  -- even in systematic ways --
just as we do about formal logic's judgments about some arguments.
Nice tool, but sometimes gets it wrong.  And even if it were never
wrong, that does not mean that it gets the right results for the right
reasons: I don't measure heights and run calculations (and certainly not
in centimetres), I just notice that someone is tall.

As for the beauty of a fuzzy program for dealing with astronaut
candidates, hey, that is what that language (and perhaps even that chip)
was designed to do, so of course it does it apparently better than a
general purpose langauge on a general purpose chip.  But does the computer
in the end do anything differently as a result of the instructions
(assuming the program is run on general purpose chip)?  Snobol programs
for character manipulation are models of simplicity compared to, say, C
programs to do the same thing.  But the computer does basically the same
thing when it executes (slightly -- but insignificantly - - different
because of different optimizations; they just do useless things in
different places). That does not mean that the concepts embodies in Snobol
are better or nearer the mean of text than those in C.  It is just a
matter of convenience for a purpose (lost now, since there is no Snobol
for anything after 286).

On another point, "deep" should be used very cautiously (always good
advice, of course, about key words) in this discussion, since it is not
always a vertical dimension.  It is, in fact , the front-to-back dimension
in furniture (and the like, I'm unsure about 3-D matrices in math), along
with "high/tall" (top-to bottom) and "wide"  (left-to-right, all in "in
use" orientation).  I wonder what the difference is between the high sea,
the deep sea and the wide ocean, in the English store of cliche's (or
tropes anyhow).
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