reply to And #2

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

>Now I do concede that there could be a different project, where we come
>together and form some kind of community and agree to interact with one
>another in certain ways, e.g. practising free love, not raiding someone
>else's stash, not using metaphor, and so on, but the product of this
>project would be a community, not a language.  There's nothing wrong
>with this project, but it is not the same thing as Lojban.

Well, there are some such interactions at least implicitly assumed as
part of the language design.  One for example is that Lojban speakers
will more-or-less-always speak grammatically, or at least that one may
interpret a grammatical Lojban sentence as expressing the proposition
literally represented by a sentence structured correctly according to
the defined syntax.

Thus "ta mlatu" is a claim relating the demonstrated referent and
cathood and does not represent the same proposition as "The moon is made
of green cheese" (at least not without marking that something
non-standard is going on semantically).  If it did/could, then there
would no true capability to perform logical analysis on the language
use.

Lojban, or more specifically Lojban language use, thus implicitly embeds
some desire to have the logical aspects of the communication be
accountable.  Using unmarked metaphor or irony denies that
accountability - it renders a key portion of the framework of the
language (which is more than merely its syntax) moot.

We know that people don't always realize this ideal, but the ideal still
exists.  The ideal of always-correct usage is not actually stated in the
Book, but the existence of some such ideal is strongly implied by the
existence of a YACC grammar for the language in the book.

Of those social/cultural conventions which you mentioned above, "using
metaphor" is the only one that pertains to the evaluation of the logical
nature of a Lojban language expressions.  The others are thus not proper
to prescribe as part of the "language definition".  But aspects of
"culture" which are necessary to the achievement of the goals of the
language are properly part of a language prescription.

>> But Lojban is also among other things designed to test the sapir-Whorf
>> Hypothesis.  If it did nothing that "language has no place doing" in terms
>> of possible effect on human thought and culture, then it pretty much could
>> NOt have a SWH-related effect.
>
>Do you really mean that?  I can't believe you do.  If you did mean it,
>it would surely imply the abandonment of the original goal of Loglan.

I don't see how.  If you define Lojban language as being exclusive and
unrelated to culture then by definition you end up assuming NO SWH
effect.

But I was specifically saying that Lojban has things built into it that
are explicitly NOT part of any known language nor any language's
interaction with culture.  Those things were built in IN ORDER TO test
SWH.  Some of them contradict all known cultures and languages.  Yet
they are part of the language.

>There are many different competing and in some cases equally valid
>definitions of what counts as language, or as a language.  But only by
>one of these definitions (a set of rules generating sentences
>(sound-meaning pairings)) is a language *designable*.  Since Lojban is a
>designed language, it is therefore a language in the sense that it is a
>set of rules generating sentences.
>...
>> It happens that I think the attitudinals are
>> an area where I think such effects may result, but that presumes that people
>> use them as intended - as expressions of emotions and not manipulative
>> statements primarily aimed at affecting others' emotions

If you juxtapose your earlier comment and mine that you later quoted you
perhaps can see that specifying "expressions of emotions and not
manipulative statements primarily aimed at affecting others' emotions"
is a legitimate statement about "sound-meaning pairings", because the
aim of manipulation has a meaning distinct from the expression of the
emotion itself.

Ashley:
>This says it better than I could.  I consider a language to be a loose
>mapping between behaviour and meaning, which is perhaps slightly broader
>than your sense.  But I think Lojbab considers Lojban to be a set of
>constraints on behaviour, such that any given behaviour is or is not
>'communicating in Lojban'.

I think of language as being characterized by behaviors that may or may
not have meaning (I claim that whether a behavior has a meaning is
irrelevant.  It is possible to have a language utterance that has no
determinable meaning.  There are many such Lojban utterances.)

>As such, I don't think it could reasonably be described as 'a language',
>but instead belongs in the same category, as you say, with practising
>free love, not raiding someone else's stash etc.  Also, such constraints
>on behaviour are culture, and therefore by definition not culturally
>neutral.

Lojban's claim at cultural neutrality is not the sort that you imply,
and Lojban is not culturally neutral by your standard.  The other half
of "cultural neutrality".  Lojban seeks to minimize the number of
prescribed constraints on behavior to some minimal number (metaphysical
parsimony), to ensure that those behaviors so prescribed are not
modelled after a particular existing culture (hence cultural neutrality)
AND (because of the SWH test) explicitly different from all known
language/cultural systems in one or more ways that could be presumed to
have a plausible (and hopefully measureable) cultural effect.  The
latter requires that Lojban explicitly violate your sort of cultural
neutrality - we want to force some defined linguistic behavior into the
culture and determine whether some non-linguistic behavioral changes
result.

<>I have said before that an underlying assumption of Lojban pragmatics is
<>that it is the speaker's obligation to make himself clear to the
<>listener.  This is a different pragmatic than for English and perhaps
<>other languages, where the speaker can do whatever the heck he wants and
<>it is the listener's job to figure it out.
<
<I don't think pragmatics are designable: surely they're to be discovered
<practically? Otherwise, in what sense are they pragmatic?

Pragmatics include rules and conventions for interpreting elliptical
context.  Some of those rules are specific to particular languages, and
to particular dialects within languages.

I see no reason why something must be discovered practically in order to
be pragmatic.  You seem to be attempting to draw a line based on the
etymology of the word, where the jargon use of the word is now divorced
from that etymology.

Since the study of pragmatics is included within linguistics, which is
the study of language, and not within anthropology, which is the study
of human culture, it seems rather obvious to me that pragmatics is a
part of language and therefore that rules of pragmatics are rules of
language.

>>The refgrammar is only a book, and only omne of several we intend to
>>publish to reflect the baseline.  It is a grammar first and formost, and
>>is not a statemenht of philosophy (though some of that by necessity went
>>into the writing).
>
>But surely publishing any material now that adds to or otherwise
>modifies the language as defined by the existing published material
>would constitute a violation of the baseline, at least in spirit?  A
>statement of philosophy would be great, but there's a difference between
>philosophy and prescription.

I see no addition to the language.  The published book constitutes a
PARTIAL description of that baseline, and covers primarily rules of
grammar, though necessity required that the book include some amount of
lexicon and praxis in order to make any sense.  The dictionary will
discuss the lexicon, another PART of the baseline.  The textbook will
discuss usage, another part of the baseline.  Statements of philosophy
regarding real world usage belong in the textbook more than in the
reference grammar.  And indeed, the draft textbook has many such
statements of philosophy (though I cannot recall what I said about
attitudinals off-hand, and the draft dates back 8 years now anyway).



----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
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    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/";
    Order _The Complete Lojban Language_ - see our Web pages or ask me.