Re: reply to And #2

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

>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.

Maybe I am not the one to best argue this.  Nick and perhaps Mark Shoulson
have been two people that I associate with the concept that Lojban is "hard"
relative to Klingon because the speaker feels compelled to put more effort
into being sure that a given expression is correct.

I myself have focussed on truth-functionality as being a key feature in the
language, which is why unmarked irony bothers me in particular.  The history
here, as perhaps Jim Carter and pc know better than I, is that the two of
them differed in the early '80s over the truth-functionality of the
attitudinals.  Glossing over the details, Carter wanted all attitudinals to
in essence be metalinguistic predications.  pc argued that this was not the
design of the language (and won, and we have inherited this in Lojban along
with pc, whoi helped me frame the early attitudinal system).  That such a
thing could be argued as a design pronciple surely means that it is part of the
design implicitly.

>> 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?

I guess I take a long view of the language.  To people today, English
started with Chaucer and Shakespeare and the King James Bible.  What "is"
English, is the language of the long-surviving literature.  Features that were
part of English and which did not survive are transient things that are
not really of the essence of the language.  That there IS an essence is
necessitated by the fact that this relatively ancient literature still
communicates effectively to us even when words and meanings have changed.

When I talk of the essence of LOjban, it is this kind of essence of which
I speak.  There are principles built into the language (like attempts to
adhere to Zipf's Law in the design) that are attemts to shape the way the
language is 100 years from now, with relatively little concern for how the
language will be used by us non-fluent pidgin speakers today.  The concept
of the attitudinals as "expressions of emotion" rather than things one
plans out and manipulates before expressing is another of these.  Fluent native
 speakers of Lojban presumably will do precisely this, and it will be as hard
to control ones attitudinal excpressions as it is to fake a well-run lie
detector test (it may be do-able, but not under normal, relaxed conditions).
Audiovisual isomorphism is another design principle.  I doubt that any speaker
of the language does so perfectly enough to allow computer transcription of
the speech stream to be uniquely analyzed into sounds, then words, then
sentences, then parsed.  But we intedn that in the future this be so, and
desoigned the language for what may not even be technically possible with
current speech recognition technology.

With regard to the logical analysis, since I am such a bullock in the china
shop of logic that I can hardly speak with authority, I can only rely on
what JCB wrote and what actual practice of the language has revealed.  I
can observe what JCB designed into his bersion of the language - predicates,
prenexes and the possibility of direct representation of the quantificational
aspects of logic, the resolution of ambiguity in grammar, mapping of logical
connectives as the basic ones of the language.  These are clearly core, and
their survival across 40+ years of language design and redesign speaks to
their importance.

But JCB also built into the language things like masses, in-mind description
with "le" anda general ability to avoid explicit use of quantifiers whuile
still rema9ining "correct" logically.  These have existed, and they have
been used, sloppily, by him, by me, by others.  They are also part of the
language and they are important, but somehow communication has taken place
without people using them consistently.  The long term goal is of course
correct usage by all, but in the short term, it is less important.

>> 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.

You misread my endorsement.  I have said that 1) the people learning the
;anguage generally do not have the knowledge of logic to even perform the
analysis to prevent misuse of the logical aspects being debated; 2) the
semantics of the language remains largely unanalyzed and we don't have
enough usage and key people represented and paying attention to perform such
analysis descriptively (and I do not feel that it is a design prionciple that
we embody a particular logico-semantic theory in the language design to the
extent necessary to perform the kind of logical analysis you want, at least in
part because the design would not survive the misuse that would trample it
before we had fluent speakers - put more clearly perhaps: we put marked sumti-
raising into the language design and urged it as a standard, but even the most
skilled users of the language make frequent errors of sumti-raising - I see
no reason to strive for any greater level of logic-osemantic accountability
than the ABILITY to mark sumti-raising,because I cannot see that we will
do better than that in the long term.  By contrast, people seem to have little
trouble using the right logical connectives.)

I do not say that irony denies the accountability of the language.  I say
that UNMARKED irony denies it.  In Lojban, logical structurethat is importany
is explicit and accurately represented.  Truth and falsity seems to be
a most basic concept of logical structure (w ehave acknowledged fuzzy and
multi-valued logics in the design, but the core of the language design
is still bi-valued logic)  Unmarked irony fails toacknowledge this basic
design feature.

>you endorse
>and yourself intend to adopt a usage where logical aspects
>are used in a slapdash way where the difference between {all
>--More--
>cats are not black} and {not all cats are black} is treated
>as unimportant.

NO I do not.  Rather, when the difference is important, I expect that the
usage will mark its importance by using prenexes.  I believe that most of
the not-explicitly-marked sumti are going to be relatively immune from
logical analysis at the same level as prenex-explicit stuff.  I base this on
the in-minded-ness of "le" - no matterwhat analysis you do, it can always
be countered by "that wasn't the in-miond set I had n moind".  I base this on
"lo [unicorn]" which by its usage appears to stipulate a universe of
discourse where unicorns exist, and where, therefore, all assumptions must
be sstated explicitly before you can make logical deductions."

But my condonance of logical sloppiness is another thing entirely.  It is
not that I ADVOCATE logical sloppiness, and certainly not at the level of
"the difference between {all cats are not black} and {not all cats are black}
is treated as unimportant".  It is again a recognition that actual Lojban usage
is not going to be up to the level of correct logic for some time to come.
I want to get the language into use, and worry about correctness when we
have a better idea what "correct" is because we have experience in knowing
what can be done with the language.  The standard of correctness has to be
achievable or no one will try to achieve it, and right now it has to be
achievable by those with no training in predicate logic beyond what is
provided in the refgrammar.

>> 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.

No I did not mean that (and am not sure that is what I DID say).  I think I
meant to say that we need to prescribe somewhat more than the narrow
definition of language if we are to have a controlled test bed sufficiently
well-defined that we can detect a Sapir-Whorf effect and identify it
convincingly as such.

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