Date: Tue, 2 Dec 1997 06:43:02 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712021143.GAA13483@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Ashley Yakeley Sender: Lojban list From: Ashley Yakeley Subject: Re: gaffs X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Status: RO Content-Length: 2548 Lines: 63 At 1997-12-02 02:51, Robin Turner wrote: >>I have some more: >> >>(i) Pornography is rape. >> >>(j) Meat is murder. >> >>(k) Abortion is murder. >> >>(i) & (j) are on their face category errors, so they must be metonymic if >>they are to have any meaning at all. I think if you tried to translate >>any of these three into Lojban, the emotional subterfuge involved would >>become very obvious. > >I would say "Pornography is rape" is metaphorical, not metonymic. I'm >actually working on a web-essay on metaphor in the pornography debate at >the moment. The reason I consider it a category error is because 'pornography' describes media, and 'rape' describes an action. So either 'pornography' is metonymic for a class of action related to pornography (creating pornography? reading pornography?), or 'rape' is metonymic for a class of media (depiction of rape?) related to rape, or, most dangerously, 'is' is metonymic for 'is analogous to', 'causes', or some other relation related to identity. ... >A more honest rendering would be "Pornography >is analogous to rape" or even "Pornography is a contributing factor in >rape." I think these are metonymic interpretations. ... > "Meat is murder" is perhaps metonymic, boiling down to "Eating >meat causes >one to participate in a chain of events which involves the killing of >annimals, which I hold to be as abhorrent as the killing of humans and >therefore can be classified as murder." In Lojban {zekri} (crime) has an x2 place for the culture, etc., against which the x1 is a crime, so it's made obvious that 'crime' is subjective (in the absense of some absolute authority). One advantage Lojban has over English is that, typically, all the important terms for a relation are represented in a gismu's place-structure (of the ones I've seen). I imagine this will continue with the creation of other brivla. >I shall bear this in mind when I >bite into my next kebab (vegetarianism is virtually unheard of here). > "Abortion is murder" is a tenable, if inflammatory, position - since >murder is usually defined as the unlawful or unjustifiable killing of a >human being, if you regard a foetus as fully human and its destruction >unjustifiable, you can indeed claim that abortion is murder. However, if >you do not clarify your terms, you risk equivocation, and such slogans >again do not encourage reasoned argument, IMHO. Lojban seems to explicitly provide space for these terms in a way English does not. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA http://www.halcyon.com/ashleyb/