Rational thought requires ambiguity

[Chris Bogart <cbogart@QUETZAL.COM>]

On Fri, 3 Oct 1997, Andrew Sieber wrote:
> how this particular ambiguity is allowed to remain.  John Clifford
> pointed out that the ambiguity can be resolved by rephrasing the phrase,
> but that does nothing to resolve the issue of the ambiguity of _this
> particular_ phrase, "skami pilno".

I think Lojbab's comments on this topic in his recent message were very
good, but I wanted to add something here: rather than attempt to eliminate
ambiguity, lojban attempts to let the speaker decide exactly when and how
much ambiguity to use, and to mark it as such.  I think there's a
compelling argument that says it's impossible to eliminate ambiguity from
language: part of what lojban does, I think, is provide a more rational
way of marking and managing ambiguity.

As an analogy, imagine you're trying to draw the Mandelbrot set, or some
other fractal picture;  you have a screen of a certain size and certain
resolution.  When you're drawing some sub-area on the screen you use an
algorithm to break the picture down further to get a value at each pixel;
but when your sub-area happens to be the size of a single pixel, you want
a different kind of analysis: you want to gloss over the detail within the
area and pick a single color to represent the infinite complexity found
within that pixel.

Assuming that the world and our ideas about it are in many cases more like
fractals than like traditional geometric shapes, Lojban needs tools for
both precision and ambiguity at its disposal, just as English does.  A
tanru or a predicate with omitted places is like a pixel -- it glosses
over details in order to prevent infinite recursion.

co'o mi'e kris