Re: gaffs

[Ashley Yakeley <AshleyB@HALCYON.COM>]

At 1997-12-02 02:51, Robin Turner wrote:

>>I have some more:
>>
>>(i) Pornography is rape.
>>
>>(j) Meat is murder.
>>
>>(k) Abortion is murder.
>>
>>(i) & (j) are on their face category errors, so they must be metonymic if
>>they are to have any meaning at all. I think if you tried to translate
>>any of these three into Lojban, the emotional subterfuge involved would
>>become very obvious.
>
>I would say "Pornography is rape" is metaphorical, not metonymic.  I'm
>actually working on a web-essay on metaphor in the pornography debate at
>the moment.

The reason I consider it a category error is because 'pornography'
describes media, and 'rape' describes an action. So either 'pornography'
is metonymic for a class of action related to pornography (creating
pornography? reading pornography?), or 'rape' is metonymic for a class of
media (depiction of rape?) related to rape, or, most dangerously, 'is' is
metonymic for 'is analogous to', 'causes', or some other relation related
to identity.

...
>A more honest rendering would be "Pornography
>is analogous to rape" or even "Pornography is a contributing factor in
>rape."

I think these are metonymic interpretations.

...
>        "Meat is murder" is perhaps metonymic, boiling down to "Eating
>meat causes
>one to participate in a chain of events which involves the killing of
>annimals, which I hold to be as abhorrent as the killing of humans and
>therefore can be classified as murder."

In Lojban {zekri} (crime) has an x2 place for the culture, etc., against
which the x1 is a crime, so it's made obvious that 'crime' is subjective
(in the absense of some absolute authority). One advantage Lojban has
over English is that, typically, all the important terms for a relation
are represented in a gismu's place-structure (of the ones I've seen). I
imagine this will continue with the creation of other brivla.

>I shall bear this in mind when I
>bite into my next kebab (vegetarianism is virtually unheard of here).
>        "Abortion is murder" is a tenable, if inflammatory, position - since
>murder is usually defined as the unlawful or unjustifiable killing of a
>human being, if you regard a foetus as fully human and its destruction
>unjustifiable, you can indeed claim that abortion is murder.  However, if
>you do not clarify your terms, you risk equivocation, and such slogans
>again do not encourage reasoned argument, IMHO.

Lojban seems to explicitly provide space for these terms in a way English
does not.

--
Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA
http://www.halcyon.com/ashleyb/