Re: reply to And #2

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

> >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.

I don't perceive any of this as implicit in the language design.

> 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.

I don't see the problem. What sort of logical analysis do you
have in mind?

> 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.

It strikes me as strange that you say that irony denies the
accountability of the logical aspects of the communication
(- I disagree) yet you have also declared that you endorse
and yourself intend to adopt a usage where logical aspects
are used in a slapdash way where the difference between {all
cats are not black} and {not all cats are black} is treated
as unimportant.

> 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.

I will go as far as agreeing that there is a general presumption
among ourselves that utterances should be syntactically well-
formed. Beyond that, I detect little agreement.

> >> 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.

I infer that you did not intend to say, as you originally did, that
Lojban could have a SW effect only if it did something that falls
outside the narrow definition (lg as gerna) of language.

--And