Re: [jboske] The ugly head of ni

[Robert LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 12:47 PM 10/9/02 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
> Here is a summary of my thoughts on ni, yet again, but this time because I
> was asked:
>
> Conceived to provide a quantitative counterpart to the qualitative ka, it
> is redundant with jei and it's based on a deprecated notion of ka.
>
> The deprecated sense of ka to which ni is bound was the miserable result
> of the conflation between the English "redness" as the property of being
> red (that's ka ce'u xunre; that which is shared by all red things) and the
> amount of redness (that's jei ko'a xunre; it is 54% red).

That is not what jei means, though the two are similar in meaning IFF the 
scale of quantity is from 0 to 1.
jei ko'a xunre du pimuvo
means that the truth value of "X is red" is .54 on some kind of fuzzy logic 
scale. In other words, it is 54% true that ko'a is red. This may or may 
not mean that it is a color blend which is 54% red and 46% na'e 
xunre. That would constrain fuzzy logic usage too much, IMO.

ni ko'a xunre du pimuvo
means that there is X's redness is measured as .54 units on some scale, 
which may or may not be a unitary one.

Now it happens that colors often are often defined such that truth value 
overlaps with quantity measurement. But most other concepts do not mix 
purely, and the measure of X-ness is usually NOT the same as "the truth 
value of (ko'a Xs)". To argue about "ni" solely on the basis of color 
seems to intentionally limit the concept.

lojbab

--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org