Return-Path: Received: from SEGATE.SUNET.SE by xiron.pc.helsinki.fi with smtp (Linux Smail3.1.28.1 #1) id m0tJ3n3-0000ZUC; Fri, 24 Nov 95 21:28 EET Message-Id: Received: from listmail.sunet.se by SEGATE.SUNET.SE (LSMTP for OpenVMS v1.0a) with SMTP id D3258409 ; Fri, 24 Nov 1995 20:28:06 +0100 Date: Fri, 24 Nov 1995 11:24:01 -0800 Reply-To: "Peter L. Schuerman" Sender: Lojban list From: "Peter L. Schuerman" Subject: Re: warm fuzzies X-To: "John E. Clifford" X-cc: Lojban List To: Veijo Vilva In-Reply-To: Content-Length: 2032 Lines: 40 John, This was a good posting, very well considered. As for being miffed at people who "say we cannot do some of these things"... I think Lojban certainly has the ability to express things in fuzzy logic, or any sort of logic. Is there anything a given language *cannot* express? People always find a way to express themselves, no matter what language they speak. However, my point about fuzzy logic has never been whether or not Lojban can express it, but rather to explicate the inherent fallacies in fuzzy thinking. One fallacy is that by using numbers as adjectives, we enable mathematical manipulation of those descriptions. However, a person who is a "4" on a scale of 1 to 10 is not twice as ugly as an "8", because beauty/ugliness simply has no mathematical component and is not truly measured in this way. While the value of the numeral 4 *is* half of the value of the numeral 8, when these numerals are assigned to things such as baldness, beauty, truth, etc. they cease to function as numbers. Another fallacy is the idea that a truth value of other than 0 or 1 has any ultimate meaning. I would concede that a statement *could* have an intermediate truth-value, but such a result only indicates that the statement must be further analyzed. If fuzzy logic has any value, it is that it can generate such intermediate truth values which, rather than being taken as some sort of final answer, can instead demonstrate that a statement is based on abstraction which needs to be further clarified. On Fri, 24 Nov 1995, John E. Clifford wrote: > I welcome various expositions about how > Lojban might do these things with the tools at hand and tend to be a bit > put out with those who say we cannot do some of these things or that we > should do more of one, especially before the proclaimer gives it a good > try. > pc>|83 > Peter Schuerman plschuerman@ucdavis.edu Co-editor, SPECTRA Online for back issues: http://www.well.com/user/phandaal/