From - Mon Feb 26 10:37:35 1996 Date: Sun, 25 Feb 1996 10:21:37 -0800 (PST) From: "John E. Clifford" To: Bob LeChevalier Cc: cowan@ccil.org, veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI Subject: Re: open Lojban issues Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 0 Given my unfondness for YACC and the fact that I have not followed developments therein since the creation of the umpteenth version of _e_, I'll pass on all technical grammar questions. (I hope that the forthcoming refgram will contain a fully commented copy of the current grammar and some clues as to what those odd names mean. Most seem to be historic but to have long since departed from their historical roots.) So, I jump to B. What I suggested, actually, was 1) that the quantifier+variable forms (the basic forms in logic) be taken as basic in Lojban too and that the quantifier + predicate or term be defined as representing them. Thus, for example, _ro lo broda_ would be the universal without existence claim simply because it represented _roda ganai broda gi_. This is standard logico-linguistic stuff. The only case for a universal requiring existence of a broda would be _ro da poi broda_ or any expression taken as equivalent to that (none have yet been so construed officially, I think). 2) I suggested that we eliminate the implicit INTERNAL quantifiers in _lo broda_ and the like. Thus, a set is the size it is but we need not comment on its size, even implicitly, to refer to it -- we may not know its size and we certainly may not care. The internal quantifiers would still be legal, in case we did want to comment. And the set could be empty without any conflicts arising with unmentioned sizes, thus eliminating the problem from which all of this started. I think the current rules about implicit *external* quantifiers is probably about right. I am not sure just where "world-creating" comes from in this discussion and would like to keep it out, since it has horror of its own. At most, I would say that someone who uses an existence-implying form is in a universe of discourse which contains that sort of thing, but that need not be world creating, even if someone else is not in that universe of discourse but claims to be in the same discourse. These are pragmatic, not semantic, problems -- somebody has to get with the program. On G. I am less sure about context leapers and related items now than I was a year ago, since I have spent the intervening time in the slough of opaque contexts and nested quantifiers, where the notions SEEM at first glance to fit as well as the usual cases (negations and conditionals, usually). But each of these cases requires a slightly different arrangement and I am not sure that a single mark will deal with all of them -- or whether I would want it to. I say drop it for now and cope with the problem by the other means we have for a while: forethought quantifiers for the transparent cases, second order devices (e.g., introducing sets) for the nested quantifier cases, and the stock prohibition on quantifiying into opaque contexts, even when they seem to be talking about external things (the things inside the opaque context may be so different as to make the quantification meaningless in practice: the Lojbab of my beliefs may have NONE of the properties of the real Lojbab, if I am seriously confused). I do not recognize MY problem of leapers in what Lojbab says, but that may just be terminological drift that has plagued Lo??an since day one. I particular, I don't see what lambda has to do with it. But, speaking of lambda, I want to reiterate my problem with introducing lambda only in _ka_ constructions before we have any rules for making sense of it gnerally. Or, maybe, I just want to caution against calling the form used in _ka_ constructions a lambda form, with the implication that it can be used elsewhere.