Date: Sat, 29 Nov 1997 07:48:36 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711291248.HAA23374@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Robin Turner Sender: Lojban list From: Robin Turner Subject: Is Lojban important? X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 3565 X-From-Space-Date: Sat Nov 29 07:48:38 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU > >>Of course it's not that important. I participate in Lojban >>only because I enjoy it, not because it's important. If I >>less selfishly cared more about things that are important I >>should instead be pouring my energies into exposing human rights >>violations around the world, or something like that. Isn't something you enjoy important? If people didn't consider the things they enjoyed to be important, perhaps there wouldn't be much point in having human rights in the first place. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and all that. >I don't agree that lojban is unimportant. The logical gaffs made by >politicians speaking natlangs are often apparent only with careful >examination. Remember trying to match the utterance to the logical fallacy >in Logic A01? Post hoc ergo propter hoc just slides on by if both the >antecedent and conclusion are platitudinous. A spoken first order predicate >logic may be helpful in making such gaffs more obvious. It is easier to >find certain kind of logical errors in Pascal code than in C code, due to >strong typing, formal loop constructs, and even "pretty printing" >autoformatting. I hypothesize that some of the human rights violations >exist because of logical gaffs. Well, there's obviously a lot more going on than a few simple post hoc fallacies, but yes, I agree to a large extent. People deny others their rights at least partly because they aren't thinking straight, and more importantly, they fail to oppose (or even recognise) such violations because their lack of critical thinking. Chomsky once said that all you need to participate effectively in politics is average intelligence and an open mind, but it's the second part that's difficult. It's made a little easier if you possess some basic logical tools, and a language that encourages precise, logical thought could be a pretty powerful tool. > I hypothesize that some human mental >illness also exist because of logical gaffs. Absolutely. In fact two major schools of psychotherapy (cognitive therapy and rational emotive therapy) are based on this premise. The latter is in fact based to a large extent on General Semantics - those interested might care to have a look at Albert Ellis' "A New Guide to Rational Living", or check out (I actually find some of Ellis' semantics a bit dubious, but I think his general approach is sound). A language where, for example, obligation is an attitudinal, rather than an assertion, might conceivably be a good mental prophylactic. >Perhaps even a small number of >lojban speakers can have signficant effects on the discourse of politics. >Lojban may be more than just a toy. It's possible. I remember an incident in one of Asimov's "Foundation" books where a bunch of logician's where asked to translate a long diplomatic speech into symbolic logic. After removing all the contradictions, circularities and non sequiturs,it boiled down to "we've got guns; you haven't." I don't see Lojban as the be-all and end-all in logical languages (and I doubt if anyone else here does) but it's a step in the right direction (as is, I think, the field of metaphor studies - see ). My attitude is similar to that expressed in one of Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, where Marain is described as "language as cultural weapon, and proud of it"!(incidentally, does anyone know if Banks actually did some work on Marain?) Robin Turner Bilkent Universitesi, IDMYO, Ankara, Turkey.