psychotherapeutic lojban

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

Steve to me:
> >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.
>
> 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.  I hypothesize that some human mental
> illness also exist because of logical gaffs. 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.

In an ideal world, but is there really any chance that Lojban will
bring about any of this beneficial increase in logicality?

Would be prepared to say this to your peers & colleagues?

> >I got an A but it was a baby logic course. On my Montague Semantics
> >course, the most incomprehensible one I ever took, I got a D too.
> >But I've always been a bad learner.
>
> Logic was easy. Transformational Grammer was easy. Physical Chemistry was
 hard.

That's why you ended up Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and
Medicine, while all I could manage to be was a linguistician.

--And

p.s. I got an A in my Chemistry O level. My teacher predicted
I'd fail, but I memorized stuff about Bessemer Converters,
Vanadium IV Pentoxide, and something that involved the sequence
"Potassium, Calcium, Sodium, Magnesium, Aluminium, Zinc, Iron,
Lead, Silver, Gold". Fuck knows what that was all about.