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[lojban-beginners] Re: Lightbulb
I'd have to read more about Aristotle's causalities to know for sure,
but at first glance it appears they can be loosely mapped onto the
Lojban cause words.
Material Cause: {ri'a}, "because of cause and effect"
Formal Cause: {ni'i}, "logically entailed by"
Efficient Cause: {ki'u}, "because of reason"
Final Cause: {mu'i}, "because of motive"
"Everything happens for a reason" is trivially true as a statement of
cause-and-effect, but is easily misinterpreted as a statement of
supernatural providence. "Why" as in "with what end purpose in mind"
and "why" as in "resulting from what" are two completely different
things. Some supernaturalists have trouble distinguishing them.
-Matt
On 10/4/06, Chris Capel <pdf23ds@gmail.com> wrote:
On 10/3/06, Daniel Adamec <dadamec123@gmail.com> wrote:
> What {sumti tcita} would be used for 'because' in a response to the query
> "why is the light bulb bright?". (apologies for the simplicity of the
> sentence).
[...]
> I am probably making the problem more complicated than it really is, so once
> again I apologize for the simple explanation I will no doubt receive from
> several (rightfully) exasperated {jboprenu}
I believe Aristotle categorized causality pretty thoroughly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle#Causality
It's nice that Lojban differentiates between different modes of
causality. You're really not making the question more complicated than
it is, because it *is* pretty complicated.
I wonder which Lojban words correspond to which aristotelian causes.
Maybe Lojban's distinctions are somewhat orthogonal? That would be
disappointing.
Chris Capel
--
"What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to bat a bee? What is it
like to be a bee being batted? What is it like to be a batted bee?"
-- The Mind's I (Hofstadter, Dennet)