Re: logical gaffs

[Steven Belknap <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

>
>mi'o gugde cu nitcu X     (hope I've got the grammar right this time!)

You might say

mi'o gugde cu nitcu da

"Our country needs it."

>
>I would guess that a Lojban-speaker would automatically answer
>
>cu nitcu ko'a ma
>
>We could also imagine similar Lojban "heckling" along the lines of
>
>mi'o cu bilga ko'a ma
>
>and so on.  I think this is much more productive than the simple question
>"why?".  Ask a politician "why?" and you get an hour-long speech about
>something completely different.

Agreed. This potential utility of the place structure for a gismu does
highlight the problems of sparse vs rich standard sumti for a given gismu.
Any concept can of course be added to a predication, but one might not
think to automatically query about a sumti which is not built in to the
place structure of a given gismu. As has been pointed out, some of the
orderings of sumti are unfortunate, and there are some inconsistencies
among similar gismu in exactly which sumti are built-in. (This is not a
problem for speaking, but might present problems for analyzing political
speech, for example, as it would not trigger an "automatic" request to fill
in that conceptual space if the place structure for that gismu did not have
a built in place for that sumti.)

>
>(at the risk of having my HTML further scrutinised, I invite Lojbanites to
>have a look at my web essay "How to get an 'ought' from an 'is'"
>(<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>) for a philosophical (more
>than political) look at these questions of need and obligation)
>
>Similarly a lot of psychotherapy involves getting people to fill in their
>missing sumti.  For example, if someone says "I need X" (love / security /
>sex / approval etc.) possible responses are "For what?" or "What will
>happen if you don't get it?"  I would imagine this kind of thing would
>again be easier in Lojban.

A thoughtful point. This is a very clear way to explain how lojban might be
of value in psychotherapy. One might generalize it a bit by saying that
Psychotherapy involves thinking carefully about ones predications. Some
sumti are missing, some are suboptimal, some are present and optimal- but
preclude possibilities one may not have considered. Some crisp sets are
profitably reconsidered as fuzzy sets, some implicit causalities are
obscure, some hidden assumptions are unacknowledged.

-Steven

Steven Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria