No Subject

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

>> >> I make no sense. Your reactions suggest that we are close to
>> >> getting back to the ancient discussion about needing lo tanxe that
>> >> led to enormous largely pointless volume 2 years ago (indeed it was
>> >> 2 years ago Thanksgiving that we had something like 200 postings in
>> >> a single day on the list or some similar nonsense).

Suggesting that the vigor of a discussion is inversely proportional to the
importance of a discussion is an interesting assertion.

>> >
>> >I don't think it was pointless. No conclusions were reached, but
>> >now we come to it again, I feel that more progress is being made
>> >and that red-herrings are more easily spottable.

Conclusions were reached. I believe that the discussion of last November &
December did affect both the baseline (slightly) and the governance of the
development of the language.

>> >I realize that to many these discussions are arcane, pedantic and
>> >pointless.
>>
>> I am beginning to feel that all of them are, until we get more usage.

I do not agree. The current discussions are interesting and helpful in
bridging the gap between theory and practice. Unfortunately, the
discussions are not linked in a useful fashion to the grammer or
dictionary, which leads to repetition and rehashing of already settled
issues. (For one, the dictionary on the lojban web site is now down.)
However, I found the discussions on irony to be quite interesting. I
believe that the use of explicit markers to denote irony defeats the whole
purpose of irony. The point of irony is to communicate a concept which both
speaker and listener recognize as metareferential, despite minimal or
absent explicit indication in the utterance that something beyond or other
than the utterance is meant. Using an explicit irony marker is like putting
a turd on your chocolate pudding. Its still chocolate pudding, but the
pudding is irrevocably contaminated, and ain't nobody gonna eat it.

>Of course it's not that important. I participate in Lojban
>only because I enjoy it, not because it's important. If I
>less selfishly cared more about things that are important I
>should instead be pouring my energies into exposing human rights
>violations around the world, or something like that.

I don't agree that lojban is unimportant. The logical gaffs made by
politicians speaking natlangs are often apparent only with careful
examination. Remember trying to match the utterance to the logical fallacy
in Logic A01? Post hoc ergo propter hoc just slides on by if both the
antecedent and conclusion are platitudinous. A spoken first order predicate
logic may be helpful in making such gaffs more obvious. It is easier to
find certain kind of logical errors in Pascal code than in C code, due to
strong typing, formal loop constructs, and even "pretty printing"
autoformatting. I hypothesize that some of the human rights violations
exist because of logical gaffs.  I hypothesize that some human mental
illness also exist because of logical gaffs. Perhaps even a small number of
lojban speakers can have signficant effects on the discourse of politics.
Lojban may be more than just a toy.

One way to help Polio victims was to build iron lungs. Another way was to
create vaccines. Should Sabin and Salk be condemned because they choose to
develop vaccines instead of building iron lungs? Maybe lojban is a vaccine.
Maybe not. Either way, I believe we will learn interesting useful things
from messing around with lojban and its descendents.

>I got an A but it was a baby logic course. On my Montague Semantics
>course, the most incomprehensible one I ever took, I got a D too.
>But I've always been a bad learner.

Logic was easy. Transformational Grammer was easy. Physical Chemistry was hard.

-Steven

Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria