Message-Id: <m0sXr43-0000ZFC@xiron.pc.helsinki.fi>
Date:         Sun, 16 Jul 1995 20:56:04 EDT
Reply-To:     jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU
Subject:      Re: epistemology
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 3787
Lines: 100

la stivn cusku di'e

> Are lojban meanings intrinsic or invented?

What does that mean? Are English meanings intrinsic or invented?
Lojban meanings are mostly based on English ones, although it is
not a one to one mapping, of course.

> xorxe cusku di'e
>
> I think the two possibilities are:
>
>         re lo jubme cu se tuple vo lo tuple
>
> (1)     Two tables have four legs each.
>
> (2)     Each of two tables are in relationship "se tuple" with
>         each of four legs.

la stivn di'a cusku

> Each of the bridi & cmavo is defined, and the grammer is defined. Is there
> any ambiguity then as to what the lojban means?

Not everything about the grammar is defined yet. It is clear which sentences
are grammatical, but it is not clear what is the meaning of some grammatical
sentences.

> Is Jorge attempting to
> translate an unambiguous lojban sentence into english (an inferior language
> not quite up to the task), or is he arguing that one possible translation
> must be chosen over the other?

One of the possibilities must be chosen if the sentence is to avoid
ambiguity (which is supposedly one of Lojban's fortes). I wouldn't say
English is inferior just because it is not so strict. In many respects
it is an advantage to allow all manner of different interpretations
as possibilities to be disambiguated by context, and Lojban does that
in other cases, but not with this kind of scope ambiguity.

> To what extent are meanings in lojban
> arbitrary, requiring adoption of a conventional usage to facilitate
> understanding? Or are we still trying to define some elements of scoping
> rules in grammer? (This is what I thought was going on, but after reading
> some recent examples, I'm confused.)

That's exactly what's going on. As far as I understand there are only
two possibilities. I really wouldn't like to see {lo} as a scope
scrambler, which is what adopting (2) would entail. Anyway, hopefully
a decision will be taken soon so that we can go on to other things.
(There are lots of other juicy things about scope to consider, but
it doesn't make much sense to bring them up until we get this basic
stuff out of the way.)

> le cibi litce djacu

That's "each of the 38 liter-waters".

> (Do I have this right, or should the gunma concept "38 liters of water"
> also be /lei cibi litce djacu/?)

It depends what you want to say. Do you want to refer to one object
that consists of 38 liters of water, or to 38 objects, each of which
is a liter of water? If you want to refer to the 38 liters as one object,
you should say {lei cibi litce djacu} or (the one I prefer) {lei cibi
djacu litce} or {le djacu litce be li cibi}.

> lo djacu
>
> is supposed to be the same as
>
> da poi djacu
>
> for nonempty sets of djacu

Yes, that's my opinion too, but lojbab won't accept it. (For empty sets
of water they both make the sentence fail in the same way, too.)

> Is it correct to refer to the pacific ocean as /lo djacu/? There's a lot of
> individual elements of the pacific ocean that are not H2O.

True also of a glass of water.

> Even if its all
> "water", some moieties are in the form H30+ or OH-. And what about D2O? Is
> that "water"? Is fuzziness built in to the way lo & loi are used, or does
> every element of an instance of water have to be water for the designated
> thing to be called lo djacu?

No, that wouldn't make much sense. Not every element of a dog is a dog,
not every element of a blue thing has to be blue, so not every element of
a water thing has to be water. Just the global thing itself has to be water.

> This would seem to make lo djacu not usable
> for nearly all actual instances of water.

That's why {lo djacu} is not some indeterminate number of H2O molecules,
but rather it is a quantity of water in its broader sense.

Jorge