*old response to Steven B #2

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

>>I live in constant low level pain of several
>>varieties that I mostly associate with stress.
>
>Sorry to hear that.  I would think that this would make stressful
>situations doubly unpleasant.  I retract my suggestion that you
>quadruple the size of the dictionary to include a scale specific
>definition for every gismu.

Of course I also weigh 380 pounds, again mostly from stress eating,
which is perhaps a more direct explanation for my pain.

(Interestingly, I had the stomach flu a week ago, lost 10 lbs in 2 days
due to diarrhea and most of my pain symptoms also disappeared thereafter
as well, and have not yet returned.  My wife jokingly says that this is
because after the way my stomach felt for 2 days, the pain is no longer
registered on a noticeable scale.

This is probably not the case - I just am not experiencing as much pain.

But if it were true, it could be seen as evidence that the subjective
pain scales are not trustable over time.  I am not sure I could compare
my stomach cramps of last week with stomach cramps I had as a kid, or
even with muscle cramps I had 6 months ago after a heavy exercise
session.  And in any event, there is no way that you or I or anyone
could come up with a meaningful ordinal scale to compare my stomach
cramps when I had the flu with the cramps that Nora or my son Avgust had
2 days later from presumably the same illness.

>Yet, meaningful, useful conversation can occur about this experience.
>Dismissing all this stuff as "subjective" would be a disservice to many
>of my patients, and would leave many of them in more pain than
>necessary.

I don't think anyone disagrees with this.  But expressing pain on a
scale predated fuzzy logic as a field of study.  The issue is whether
fuzzy logic principles are well enough understood that a specific
linguistic solution to expressing them should be hard-coded into the
language.  I am inclined to think that a) the expression of fuzzy logic
and other scales linguistically in various languages is NOT well
studied, and b) the whole subject is sufficiently controversial that we
want to tread carefully.  We have certainly built a lot of varieties of
scalar expression into the language, and the raw linguistic materials
exist to construct new ones as the need arises.  I don't want to favor a
particular approach in the design prescription, because, among other
things, it would require us to teach fuzzy logic, and that particular
school of fuzzy logic in the refgrammar and textbook.

>>I think that people BELIEVE they have to categorize and cubbyhole in
>>order to be "objective".  Not being categorical has earned the label
>>"slippery slope" for good reason.
>
>Insisting on a nominal or categorical scale has earned the label
>"pedantic" for good reason!
>
>Many people are falsely taught that Aristotlean two-valued logic is the
>"only" correct logic.  Perhaps it would be better to label this approach
>as Zoroastrianism, as Zoroaster's beliefs, as described in the
>Zend-Avesta, seem to have influenced many later belief systems, and
>Aristotle did a lot of other things besides introducing the law of the
>excluded middle.  I believe this misinformed insistence on two-valued
>logics does much harm.

Lojban does not particularly favor two-valued logic, except perhaps in
its logical connectives.  The explicit distinction between scalar and
predicate negation alone removes a key impediment to fuzzy logic since
the scalar je'a/no'e/na'e - applicable to ALL predicates - alone
establishes an at-least-tri-valued logic.  The use of the 7-valued ju'o
scale and the 7-valued la'a scale, and the as yet unexplored cu'o selbri
unit provide us with so many resources we really need to see what can be
done with what we have before we decide we need more

(and don't forget that on pain scales you also have .oi+ro'V+intensifier
- a total of 6 7-valued scales of pain to play with,not to mention the
other attitudinals - this could be far more important to diagnostics
because we explicitly recognize that pain has emotive aspects to it
independent of the physical ones - something I think that has become
recently accepted, but certainly is not built into any language before
Lojban.)

>I think that the logic boxes in our heads are fuzzy logic boxes, and
>that the tuning begins at birth.  We can output two-valued logic, if
>that's what is required, but again, the output of a logic does not
>specify the algorithm used to calculate that output.  Granted that litle
>is known about the basis of consciousness, but if brains have discrete
>states, why do they seem so analog in function?

The answer to this is that, if our brains are so fuzzy, why didn't
language evolve to more closely reflect that fuzziness.  Languages are
GOOD at expressing definiteness and poor at expressing fuzziness of
categories.  Language evolved with the species, and its nature has not
substantially changed since or as a result of Aristotle, so far as I
know.

The answer seems to me that our brains MIGHT be scalar-analog, which is
why scalar negation does show up in language, even though it gets the
added baggage of contradictory and metalinguistic negation tossed on top
of it.  Lojban already separates these.

>I think much of the argument results from believing that one's preferred
>mode of thinking is the only valid mode of thinking.  Just cause Frodo
>the Hobbit can't wield a greatsword doesn't mean greatswords are not
>useful weapons.  (I am a great admirer of Frodo, however.  He has other
>skills.)

I never got that from Peter's comments or anyone else's.  I heard
specific complaints about some of your examples, and a general
skepticism that the problem is well-enough understood to choose a
specific approach, and perhaps a fear that building in fuzzy logic too
explicitly would remove the possibility of 2-valued logic (which would
not happen).  I don't think anyone really denied that you got benefit
from your pain scales, for example - the question was whether those
scales had any objective truth or repeatability across multiple
observers.  Most scientists tend to be skeptical of any variety of
"truth" that is observer-dependent or context-dependent, and all of your
examples involved very subjective (if real) observations/"truths".

 lojbab