Re: category errors in sumti

[Jim Carter <jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU>]

On Wed, 17 Dec 1997 18:55:46 +0200, Robin Turner <robin@bilkent.edu.tr> writes:
>     lo nanmu cu ninmu
> is described in the refgram is "false", but there seems to be an
> implication that it is ill-formed, and hence meaningless, rather than
> false.

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously (to quote Noam Chomsky, I believe).
Even in English you can create a text that is grammatically perfect but
is semantic trash, and even more so in Lojban.  It's kind of essential to
analyse grammar separately from semantics, because the tools of grammar
are ill-suited to represent semantics, and the grammar must be known
(e.g. place assignments) before the semantics of a sentence can be looked
at.

One can take the position (and I think one does take this position in
Lojban, the Logical Language) that every predicate has a truth value, and
you assess this truth value by iterating over referents of the sumti,
sticking them into the selbri, and doing the appropriate conjunction or
disjunction.  For example, take member #1 of the referent set of "lo nanmu",
those that really are male.  Is it, and (with implicit "ro") all its
"brothers", female?  No, so the bridi is false, not meaningless.

One could get complicated with the philosophy, but the above mechanistic
interpretation of semantics is very appealing, particularly to a
computer geek like me.

James F. Carter        Voice 310 825 2897       FAX 310 206 6673
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