*old response to Steven B #1

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>This implies that color *could* (not *must*, *could*!!) be defined by an
>external, objective standard, which would be potentially quantifiable on
>an interval or ratio scale in intensity and purity.

It HAS been.  There are such standards, as jimc answered.  But someone
in tribal New Guinea learning Lojban will not have access to those
standards.  For that matter,neither you nor I have those standards handy
now.  I don't want people to have to refer to a book in order to decide
what color something is in Lojban.  That is not "natural".  For "skari",
of course, you are free to reference a book in the standards place.

This has been debated in the Loglan community for a couple decades.  My
opinion is that such a definition would be worthless, because no such
color standards are well known to even a fraction of the populace.  The
most well-known such standards are those that are tied to nature, e.g.
"sky blue", "sea green".  But this has limits - a dweller in the central
Asian steppes is not too likely to know what "sea green" is, and it is
arguable that a dweller in Los Angeles doesn't know what "sky blue" is
%^).

>I'm confused. The english-lojban dictionary gives this definition:
>
>*long (having length), x1 is | in dimension/direction x2 (default longest
>dimension) by measurement standard x3 /:/ /=/ clani (cla)
>
>This explicitly says that <clani> corresponds to "long" in the sense of
>having length, not in the sense of being greater in length.  If you are
>right, the dictionary is wrong.  (Not impossible, as lojbab
>acknowledges, and as we both know :-)
>
>Hey lojbab, what's the latest on long?  Do we need to change the
>dictionary?

I think I may have covered this already, but just in case...  Given the
misunderstanding, I will probably change the wording to "having
relatively much length".  This is an implied "greater" but the
comparison may not be overt.  I am not sure that the observer always has
an in mind "short" when he says "long".  When people use comparatives, I
want there to be an explicit, even if unstated answer to the question of
"what is shorter?".

>I don't mean to imply that, and I think we agree its not true.  Here's
>what I want to do:  Suppose I am using a 3-granularity fuzzy scale.
>Suppose speaker and listener sample a population and find the average
>height is 160 cm.  Speaker & listener then agree that:
>
>0/3 fuzzily tall is the triangle   {{0,1},{160,1},{175,0}}
>1/3 fuzzily tall is the triangle   {{160,0},{175,1},{190,0}}
>2/3 fuzzily tall is the triangle   {{175,0},{190,1},{205,0}}
>3/3 fuzzily tall is the "triangle" {{190,0},{205,1},{Infinity,1}}
>
>So it is the *apices* of the fuzzy sets, {160,175,190,205} which form an
>interval scale.  Note that the sets overlap, and that a person of any
>height between apices is partially in two sets.  This is typical fuzzy
>stuff.

But I wouldn't agree to such a division!  You are presuming that
agreement takes place.  To my wife, I am tall, and there is nothing
fuzzy about it.  To me, I am not particularly tall.  NEITHER of us is
using the same standard.  If we WANTED an objective standard, we would
just give heights in measurements and forego the subjective "tall".

>As I recall from college, the male chauvinist method for evaluation of
>womanly pulchritude employs a 10 position ordinal scale.  Typically the
>scores are presented by drunken fraternity members holding up cards with
>numbers on them.  I thought this was funny at one time, until, to my
>surprise, a woman friend of mine actually cried about being scored!  A
>group of my friends had a long discussion about this issue at the time,
>and the women in the group convinced me that this sort of thing isn't
>humorous, and is a actually a part of the daily existence of many women.
>I've indicated above that I think this is demeaning and insulting to
>women, as such scoring implies that the chief value of women lies in
>their physical attractiveness.  But that's a different soapbox.

One man's 10 is another's 3 or 4. And the latter's 10 is the former's 3
or 4. Scales of beauty, unlike height, are not well-ordered between
different observers.

Jorge later mentioned male beauty.  I know from personal experience that
my wife's evaluation of my beauty has no relationship to mine.  She
thinks I am beautiful even when grossly obese.  I suspect other women
would not agree, and >I< don't agree.  Now if she tried to describe to
me some unknown man using a numerical value for his beauty, I would have
absolutely no more information about him, or about how I would appraise
his beauty myself, than I had before.  A 10 from her would NOT lead me
to think "movie star" or "Mr.  America".

>I have no objection to attempting to come up with a mutually agreeable
>interval scale for the beauty of roses.  I think it would be hard, but I
>see no reason why it couldn't be done.

It is impossible, if two people order the set of roses differently in
beauty.  The whole point is that tallness is tied to an objective
measure, and hence there is always recourse to an objective standard
that something is "taller".  Color CAN be tied to an objective standard,
though differences from that standard are not necessarily linearly
expressed, so it is plausible but difficult to agree to an interval
scale, and it only works so long as people truly understand and even
internalize the scale.  Beauty, which has no agreed upon standard (I
found the computer-generated "beautiful face" to be quite plain myself),
nor has a well-ordered set between any two individuals, is not subject
to such an interval scale.

>>Ok. My question is what to do when you don't have an objective continuous
>>spectrum from which to define the fuzzy sets.
>
>Make one.

In the case of "beauty", or even of "color", and possibly even "tall", I
believe you are then artificially creating a NEW concept that is not the
natlang concept of beauty or color (or tall).

Jorge replied:
>It could be done, of course, but then we would be using the word "melbi"
>as jargon, not as people understand it.

What I just said %^)

>There is no law against redefining "melbi" and giving it units according
>to some measurable quantity.

Yes there is.

>That does not mean that beauty, as understood by speakers of the
>language, is a quantity that can be objectively measured.  You would be
>measuring something else and using an already existing word for your new
>concept.

And that is what is unacceptable.  In Lojban you DO NOT use
already-existing words for new concepts.  Make a lujvo or use a fu'ivla.
Lojban will NOT have cutesy names for subatomic properties like "color",
"strangeness", and "barns".  Indeed I suspect the dikyjvo proponents
would even oppose lujvo based on the Lojban equivalents for those words.
As a scientist, I have found the confusion engendered by trying to
communicate scientific concepts using non-scientific words redefined as
jargon to be hopelessly confusing.

Steven replied:
>I think that your view is a legitimate one, and is a clearer statement
>of the same point that Peter was raising.  However, there is another way
>to think about the different meanings of a word like energy, which I
>believe has some advantages.  I would prefer to separate the concept of
>definition from the concept of scale.  Actually, dictionaries seem to do
>this quite well.  Often dictionaries include multiple subdefinitions,
>which often correspond to different scales.  Some examples:
>
>"I'm full of energy today!"   (nominal scale)
>"I have less energy on Fridays than on Wednesdays." (ordinal scale)
>"I expended 0.4 kilojoules of energy today." (ratio scale)
>
>Certainly the last statement would qualify as what you refer to as jargon.

It is fairly safe to say that the energy one might be "full" of, and the
energy one expends in performing an activity, and the physics jargon
term "energy" are all different concepts.  One can be "full of energy",
work hard and expend a lot of energy, and still be "full of energy".
Indeed, one can have "no energy" at work, and come home and have a "lot
of energy" for a more relaxing and desirable activity.

>The natural logarithm function can be defined in pure mathematical terms
>as the ln[t] <-> Integral[1/x dx, 1,t].  This is the definition of
>logarithm to which Dylan is referring.
>
>There is a related function which is defined as an infinite sum.  This
>function has been constructed to approximate the logarithm function to
>arbitrary precision, but once defined it exists *independently* of the
>pure mathematical function.  Several definitions are possible.

But what does this have to do with dugri? dugri relates to the
logarithm, and not to some math function that approximates the logarithm
but stands indepedently.

>Speaking as someone who prefers thinking about the world in fuzzy
>numerical terms, I find English to be chafing for expressing these types
>of ideas.  I prefer either diagrams or mathematical notation.  Really,
>Jorge, English gets in the way.  Most of the articles and books about
>fuzzy sets get numerical and use diagrams fairly early on for I believe
>the same reason.

I really DO understand your desire to put a number on everything.  I've
been through a phase of that myself, which I left when I stopped
thinking of myself as a budding astrophysicist.  But your opponents are
saying that putting numbers on things implies (perhaps culturally) that
the number is meaningful.  Maybe in a fuzzy sense it is.  In other
words, the meaningfulness of a fuzzy measurement of length is greater
than the meaningfulness of a fuzzy measurement of female beauty is
greater than the meaningfulness of a fuzzy measurement of O.J.Simpson's
guilt measure across the whole racial spectrum in the US is greater than
the meaningfulness of a fuzzy measurement of, umm, the tastiness of
liver (for which I suspect you would get a lot of 10s and 0s).  In other
words, you can use numbers as long as you remember that the
applicability of numbers is itself a fuzzy value.

>Right, which is why I argue that the definition of a word should be
>clearly differentiated from the scale being used when the word is part
>of an utterance.  This could be done either by building a formal
>mechanism in lojban for adding scale to an expression, or by making a
>separate definition of each gismu for each scale.  For *most* gismu,
>this would mean that 2 or 3 of the scale-specific definitions would be
>[unspecified].  I'm sure lojbab would have no objection to redoing the
>entire dictionary, quadrupling its size in the process, so as to provide
>all the extra scale-specific definitions, most of the additions being
>[unspecified]!  :-)

I would object because the language already supports this, through the
optional addition of such places with BAI to ANY brivla or selbri or
sumti.

> You don't need analogous words for <junta> when talking about weight. I
> realize this is simple stuff, but it sure confused me. I have found it
> quite helpful to take related gismu and group their definitions together to
> sort out exactly what they mean. lojbab seemed to think that a thesaurus
> would not make sense for lojban, maybe something *like* a thesaurus would
> be helpful. Of course, if the definitions were structured cleverly, one
> could imbed them in a database to look at the gismu in this way and make
> your *own* minithesaurus each time you were stuck.

The reason that a thesaurus does not "make sense" is that you have to go
to phrases in order to have it make sense.  For example, it is "le
tordu" and "le clani" that are "opposites", while "le se tordu" and "le
se clani" are near synonyms.  The relationship between tordu and clani
is not as 'clean' as one would expect in a thesaurus.

This does not mean that groupings of gimsu in various categories is not
useful - just that it is almost certainly incomplete and flawed because
people almost always concentrate solely on the x1 place of the gismu.

lojbab