Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 02:44:58 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199802040744.CAA21157@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: more epistemic perversity (was Re: .i .uepei mi jai selke'u X-To: a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK X-cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-UIDL: c1b3e7519e0f2555caa306929dd6fac9 Status: RO X-Mozilla-Status: 8011 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Feb 04 11:56:08 1998 X-From-Space-Address: - >(i) Is there a list of which gismu places are presumed to be subject >to consensus and which are presumed to be subject to intersubjective >disagreement? Since I have been a strong opponent of semantic analysis of Lojban before usage determines the meanings, I certainly have not even considered such a list. >(ii) Your position seems to lead to strange results. For example, the >truth of {ti mlatu} is presumed to be determinable against some >consensual metaphysics, but the truth of {"true" fa le du`u ti mlatu} >is presumed to not be determinable consensually. It seems utterly >nonsensical to me. We have epistemological places on those gismu for which I (and others) recognized there is and has been significant argument regarding the metaphysics/epistemology. For other places, where there was no particular evidence of subjectivity being "metaphysically necessary" to the definition, we have the capabiliyt of adding such considerations using a BAI such as vedu'o or perhaps du'o itself. Thus you can have a subjective mlatu if you wish. There was no attempt to make Lojban semantics "systematic" or "logical" in the4 way that you seem to be seeking (regarding the gismu, that is). We were satisfied to make sure that we could cover things that we knew were "talked about" with sufficient robustness that new ideas for gismu were analyzable in terms of old ones. Place structures were analyzed only to try ot keep like places on the same order (e.g. to from per klama). At one time we drifted towards very fat gismu, and then at a later time we pared them down. Until pressured by the community, I never felt that the details of the place structures were all that important - I was quite content not to even baseline them, but was outvoted. In my opinion, it is sufficient merely to insist that, whatever the place structure, that all usages be consistent with the full place structure whether places are elided or not. This alone would ensure enormous improvement over JCB's version of the language, where gismu were used in tanru as straight loan-translations of their English keyword. I am reasonably convinced that meanings of djuno which accept the existence of all 4 places (and hence recognize that knolwedge is tied to epistemology) are a sufficiently small range of meanings that usage during the early years of the language will serve better to define the word than any anount of analysis. While I clearly have opinions about the meanings, and can state my intent when I wrote the definitions, usage will determine the meanings and NOT debate. There is nothing in the place structure (as opposed to the choice of keywords) that requires se djuno to be "true" from the standpoint of the speaker; thus I will have no compulsion about using it to report "knowledge" that I feel is-or-may-be invalid. If this makes the keyword an inopportune choice, so be it - the keywords were never intended to be defining. lojbab