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Re: [lojban] Re: [jboske] RE: Anything but tautologies




la pycyn cusku di'e


My copy of the gismu list does not actually insist that the fancu1 be a name
or a bit of text, but it is probably out of date. I agree that that
requirement is a mistake, for all sorts of reasons.

Actually, you probably have the same definition I have:


fancu [ ] function
x1 is a function/single-valued mapping from domain x2 to range x3 defined by expression/rule x4
(cf. mekso, bridi)


It does not even suggest that x1 is the name of the function. It
says that x1 is the function itself, which is much more reasonable.
The idea that it should be for the name probably came from trying
to differentiate x1 from x4: In x1 you are supposed to refer to
the function by its name, and in x4 you are supposed to refer to
it by an expression (such as 'x+1'). This does not make much sense,
because the arguments of a selbri are not the expressions used,
they are the referents of those expressions. We can't force one
type of reference in x1 and another type in x4 for the same
referent, that's not at all how Lojban works.

A sane definition for 'function' would have three places:
the function, a value of the domain, and the value of the
range it maps to. "F maps x to y". Everything else can be said
from that. The domain is a set of values: le'i se fancu, and
the range is le'i te fancu. Of course in English we sometimes
say that a function maps the domain to the range, but this is
a kind of metonymy which even if we allowed it in sloppy
Lojban it should not be enshrined in the definition.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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