From LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu Tue Sep 20 15:46:15 1994 Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by nfs1.digex.net with SMTP id AA15814 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Tue, 20 Sep 1994 15:46:06 -0400 Message-Id: <199409201946.AA15814@nfs1.digex.net> Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 5608; Tue, 20 Sep 94 15:49:06 EDT Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@UGA) by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 0075; Tue, 20 Sep 1994 12:18:15 -0400 Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 10:16:27 -0600 Reply-To: Randall Holmes Sender: Lojban list From: Randall Holmes Subject: Re: Chief logician? To: lojbab@access.digex.net Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu Status: RO I'm quite aware that you have people who can discuss these problems intelligently. So do we. There is a difference between doing this explicitly and doing it implicitly and more or less automatically, as one must in speaking a language. You address the question of how this goes on below, I see; I'm very interested in how the use of the machinery works out in practice, but it seems that the answer is "No one uses it"! On people not making statements that involve quantificational variables -- that's a practical measure of how well people have mastered the machinery, I suppose :-) Has anyone tried to speak or write about mathematics in Lojban at a level where this becomes unavoidable? Expand your comment about "the raising of abstractions"; I think I know what you are talking about (and that it is important) but I am not sure I understand you. The only genuinely alien languages you list among native languages of Lojbanists are Chinese and Finnish. On your comments about negation, I have problems with terminology, but as far as I understand you I probably disagree flatly. There is one concept of negation (the propositional connective) and then there are various other notions which NL's confuse with negation; I would hate to think that you are importing NL confusions (more likely you are defining these other notions precisely and using them correctly and the only confusion is that you call them "negation" :-) ). Explain by example what you mean by "metalinguistic" negation. Of course I understand how logical connectives applied to arguments are eliminated! The difficulty arises in expanding sentences when there is more than one such "argument" in it, and an answer I received seems to indicate that you have an official solution to this (good! -- so far as I know, TLI Loglan does not) but that it goes contrary to the natural analogy with implicit quantification (not so good -- explained fully in another post) --Randall Holmes