Is Lojban important?

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

>
>>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.

Isn't something you enjoy important?  If people didn't consider the things
they enjoyed to be important, perhaps there wouldn't be much point in
having human rights in the first place.  "Life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness" and all 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.

Well, there's obviously a lot more going on than a few simple post hoc
fallacies, but yes, I agree to a large extent.  People deny others their
rights at least partly because they aren't thinking straight, and more
importantly, they fail to oppose (or even recognise) such violations
because their lack of critical thinking.  Chomsky once said that all you
need to participate effectively in politics is average intelligence and an
open mind, but it's the second part that's difficult.  It's made a little
easier if you possess some basic logical tools, and a language that
encourages precise, logical thought could be a pretty powerful tool.

> I hypothesize that some human mental
>illness also exist because of logical gaffs.

Absolutely. In fact two major schools of psychotherapy (cognitive therapy
and rational emotive therapy) are based on this premise.  The latter is in
fact based to a large extent on General Semantics - those interested might
care to have a look at Albert Ellis' "A New Guide to Rational Living", or
check out <http://www.iret.org/> (I actually find some of Ellis' semantics
a bit dubious, but I think his general approach is sound).   A language
where, for example, obligation is an attitudinal, rather than an assertion,
might conceivably be a good mental prophylactic.

>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.

It's possible.  I remember an incident in one of Asimov's "Foundation"
books where a bunch of logician's where asked to translate a long
diplomatic speech into symbolic logic.  After removing all the
contradictions, circularities and non sequiturs,it boiled down to "we've
got guns; you haven't."  I don't see Lojban as the be-all and end-all in
logical languages (and I doubt if anyone else here does) but it's a step in
the right direction (as is, I think, the field of metaphor studies - see
<http://metaphor.uoregon.edu/metaphor.htm>). My attitude is similar to that
expressed in one of Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, where Marain is described
as "language as cultural weapon, and proud of it"!(incidentally, does
anyone know if Banks actually did some work on Marain?)




Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>