Message-Id: <199602131503.KAA17663@locke.ccil.org>
Date:         Tue, 13 Feb 1996 07:23:13 -0500
Reply-To: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender: Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From: Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Re: gismu for <lojrfuzi>
To: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Status: O
Content-Length: 9461

>>>>Why must people insist on being so bloody metaphorical.  what is wrong
>>>>with "nalsatci" as the critical modifer of the defining tanru.
>
>Because <nalsatci> is a <malglico>.

You made this clear below.  I will admit that my grasp of the fuzzy logic
concept is too fuzzy to propose a better metaphor, but I am sure that
the gismu list  provides sufficient ammunition.  I thinkl we have
use ranji and linji for some meanings of continuous, for example.  Not sure
whether they cover this case.

>I actually have no objection to the lojban gismu antonymal buddy system,
>but I am amused that the lojban cogniscenti first made a whole bunch of
>antonymal buddy pairs, then groused about there being too many.

Well, I have to admit that I was not in the "too many gismu" camp myself,
but I was outvoted strongly.  The argument was long, and cannot be easily
rehashed, and it took place offline anyway so there are no text references.
But the number of gismu has more effect on the language than merely being
aload on usage.  With a limited gismu space and an even more limited rafsi
space, we have to be careful in adding atthis point.  Same with cmavo.
I am sure that we have a few cmavo that owuld not pass muster if proposed
today, but the past exercises enormous conservative pressure on those of
us forced too many times to relearn.

> Those who think there are too many words are welcome to limit
>their vocabularies.
No one thinks there are too many words.  The number of potential lujvo of
4 temrms is I think something like 5 billion.  Doesn;t it seem reasonable
that we should attempt to use a few hundred thousand of them?

>C'mon, lojbab. I realize that length of a selbri is not a big deal. Sheesh.
>I am a relative newbie to lojban, but I knew the 17 meanings of <bilti
>cmalo nirli ckela> years before you ever heard of Loglan.

Which shows all the fun you missed as this number was revised again and again.
I think we ended up with 24 meanings, or was it 40.  See the tanru paper
in the refgrammar.  That was the kind of creeping change that got people
tired
and in that case did not even need a  grammar change to invoke it.  But the
16 then 17 then 18 then whatever meanings of thta phrase are a metpahor for
the ever changing TLI Loglan viewpoint.  (In his just released Lognet,
JCB has doubled back yet again on a chunk of his old design, rendering it
umm, difficult to understand at best.)

>I am referring
>here to the simplified English of the novel 1984, where compound predicates
>like doubleplusungood were imposed on the hapless citizenry.

Ah you wereusing "doubleplusungood quality" as a two term tanru where the
first term exemplifies the second rather than restricts it.  Not common in
Lojban, which is whyt I did not see it.  I tend to be rather too literal
these days.  I personally don't see the problem with "doubleplusungood
alas - I read 1984 long before I was aware of even the rudiments of linguistics.


I also have to admit that I am prone to malglico extensions of the semantics
of words, and hence still do not really see the problems with satci that you
see - I am probably looking at a different aspect of satci-ness than you are.
But I accept that "precise/precision" is a better use for the lujvo I
mentioned.

>Part of the reason I feel so passionately about putting fuzzy logic in
>lojban is that I believe that English and possibly other natlangs
>"Sapir-Whorf" a person into false dichotomies, which contributes to
>depression and thus much human misery.
But we are not trying to reform natural language.

Hmm it occurs to me that what we may want is the dichotmy
categorical/noncategorical, is which case na klesi would be better than
na satci???


>As lojbab (helpfully) corrected my spelling, a fuhivla for "fuzzy" is:
>
><lojrfuzi>
>

My problem with this is that it is atr least as malglico as anything I
have proposed.  You are harkening to the English meanings of "fuzzy".

I am curious what other languages do to express the cncept of "fuzzly logic"
I dislike borrowing in the field of science (much less the coining of new
gismu) that only looks at English and its semantics.  And "fuzzy" will
ALWAYS have a touch of all those other English semantic meanings, and
it would be heightened by deliberately invoking them with e.g. kerfa.
There is nothing about hair on bodies that has anything to do with fuzzy
logic.

>So we need a fuhivla for discrete logics

NO We need a lujvo.  We do not NEED fu'ivla.  Every fu'ivla we add to the
language is a confession of the inadequcy of the current language.  And
everyone who adds a fu'ivla without making a major effort to find a
lujvo that works is being a kind of intellectually lazy.  I would rather a
sloppy nonce lujvo that doesn't quite mean what you want than a sloppy
fu'ivla that means bothing in the language, but has meaning ONLY be resort to
the meaning in another language.

>So we have our antonymal buddy pair:
>
><kamkuspe>        -         <kamkantu>
>
>          corresponding to
>
>"continuous"      -         "discrete"
>
>                 or
>
>"fuzzy"           -         "Zoroastrian"
>
>
>So lojbab was right about gismu. There *were* gismu for fuzzy and discrete;
>it was my lack of lojban vocabulary (and the obtuseness of the rudimentary
>dictionary) which was the problem.

Well, I cannot comment on these words vs. my own ideas above, but you are
getting the idea.  .i'e on the attempt without judging the result.

(BTW, with you opposition to categoricalness in natlangs, I am curious
whther you have read Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, by Lakoff, which
discusses  the fact that much of natlang is inherently categorical.
YOu may be fighting much more than discrete logic in trying to reform
categorical thinking.  I would not in the least mind a discussion of
WF&DT on Lojban List by those who have read it, because I have never managed
to get through the first chapter, sue to inability to stick with reading
it long enough.)

>lojbab:
>>And there is something wrong with this - that we can answer "how to say it"
>>queations?  Or are you saying that fuzzy expressions alone are the
>>exception.
>
>I am saying that fuzzy expressions have been the exception. Usually, when I
>ask a "How do you say it?" question, somebody, (usually Jorge) comes up
>with an elegant, accurate expression. Compared with everything else in the
>language, it is just too hard to say things fuzzily in lojban. A gismu does
>not solve the problem, although at least now we can discuss the problem in
>lojban.

That is because the bent of Lojbanists is to want to say things MORE precisely
than in English, and NOT more fuzzily.  You have a biased community, making your
efforts at reform of Language even less likely to succeed.

>This is patently false. Lotfi Zadeh's initial paper was written in the
>fifties. Fuzzy logic *predates* lojban. It was well established and
>published *before* the 1960 Scientific American article. If JCB had spoken
>to the right person, he could have included it in his first version of
>Loglan, and there would have been no need for revision since then. I reread
>Zadeh's article recently, and it is perfectly clear in view of current
>understandings of things fuzzy. All the basic principles of fuzzy logic
>were done by the early sixties. Fuzzy logic isn't drifting about. It's as
>solid as arithmetic.

Weell, lets put it this way.  MCCawley added a good deal of rewrite on
fuzzy logic between early 1980 and the latest edition of his book, so it is
cleear that the interaction between fuzzy logic and language is  a rapidly
evolving field of study.  It is the applicability, not ther theory, of
fuzzy logic, that needs to be resolved.

>>We cannot hit a rapidly movcing target, and that target will no
>>doubt like the rest of logic and matematics consist of idiomatic and
>>highly unnaturalistic  conventions that no one outside the fields could
>>hipe to understand.
>
>Surely, you jest. Is lojbab unaware that he used a fuzzifier in the
>previous sentence? The word "quite" in "I am quite sure" is a fuzzy
>operator. So much for your "highly unnaturalistic conventions that no one
>outside the fields could hope to understand." You sound like the guy who
>was surprised to find he had been "ambulating" all his life. Technical
>words are useful only so far as they are understood. Need I say it? "Quod
>erat demonstradum."

The logic of "quite" whether fuzzy or whatever, is something that is still
not settled.  This is as I understand it the kind of things that logicians
like pc are doing for a living right now. And there is little conventional
agreement on what the answers are.

>If what you say is true, I would agree with your position. But what you
>claim about the novelty of fuzzy logic is quite false.

It is sufficiently novel that it has not supplanted Zoroastrian logic
in the multitudes of applications that the latter finds in science and
technology.  It is suffciently novel that a beginning logic class in schools
probably doesn;t even mention it.  Linear algebra is also as solid as
artihmetic, but has made little penetration of the beginning curriculum.
Until it does, we do nbot have evidence of consensus in science that the
concepts are as basic as you contend.  They may indeed be as important as
you say, but I have to teach the languiage to novices who know even less
about logic than I do, and that is a critical factor in my evaluating the
importance of some ideas.

lojbab