Re: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautologies

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 2/17/2002 8:03:59 PM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:

>In 'ti
>dilnu le jacygapci', 'ti' and 'le jacygapci' refer to the same thing,
>don't they? Perhaps you might want to use something like 'ti dilnu
>lo'e jacygapci', but even so, I don't think you can forbid the form
>which refers to the actual entity.

Of course x1 can be x2 in some cases, that's nothing out of the
ordinary, {mi mi kurji}, but the odd cases are when the two places
are necessarily for the same argument.

But, this will always work: an object made of a material is the same referent as that specific bit of material.  You can, of course, use some generic word for the material here and maybe you can't in the case of {fancu4}, but the situation is pretty widespread.  (And the bad examples -- that is, not examples at all -- of masses and groups and sets, if you accept them, just makes it more common.)

<Yes, I think you're right. Fortunately the duplicate is in the
last place where it can be safely ignored. (Another possibility
might be to postulate that every predicate is cyclical, so that
after the last place, places start repeating for the same arguments.
So in a predicate with 3 places x4=x1, x5=x2, and so on. This
sometimes could simplify the reordering of places.)>

To remind yet one last time, it is important that the phrase used to refer to the function in fancu4 not be the same one as is used in fancu1 or a large portion (though not all, if the range and domain are included) of the information value is lost.  "sin is the function from angles to [-1,1] computed by sin(x) = y." is not quite a tautology but only marginally more informative.