Re: [lojban] Re: Oldbie Question from private mail.

[Bob LeChevalier <lojbab@lojban.org>]

Resending to the list, since pc answered me privately and then posted 
his answer as well.

John E Clifford wrote:

>Perfectly true but not relevant.  We can -- and
>do -- make a variety of subclasses of gismu
>(hence brivla generally)
>
I did my damnedest to eliminate any such subclasses except where
absolutely necessary.

>and this is just one of
>them; calling it "adjectival" is merely a
>convenience as it works to indicate the group to
>English speakers -- which is almost all of use.
>  
>
But of course the idea is to make the language culturally neutral, so a
usage that is convenient for English speakers is immediately suspect if
we can imagine any other usage.

But there is another reason ...

All places of a predicate are equal.  Thus to say that the x1 place of
a brivla is adjectival in nature is a distraction, since we have to
consider all the places.  A brivla means more than what its x1 place
means.  A comparative blue brivla thus means both bluer and less blue.

>Certainly not "only for tanru" although the tanru
>usage was taken -- on interesting linguistic
>grounds -- as being primary.
>
A logician who says that predicates are not primary in a logical language???

>  The other usage was
>derivative.  And, it should be noted, in the
>tanru position at the appropriate level the
>second place was functional, even if it was lost
>in later developments.
>  
>
If it was really functional then we would be able to say what goes into
the x2 of blanu to make the basic claim that something is "blue".  (And
of course we still are ignoring the science that says that most colors,
being derived by perception, depend on the observer, the observing
conditions, background etc.)

>The move to standalone selbri was accompanied --
>from the present point of view -- by a detachment
>from the basic perceptual usage of the terms in
>favor of a more abstract notion.  this is not a
>simple change of role, then, but pushing some
>furter agenda. 
>

Yes - the agenda of making the language a "predicate" language.

>(I note, by the way, that even in
>the (old) official list {blanu} is marked as a
>color adjective -- apparently the 
>classification's value has been recognized fairly
>continuously.)
>  
>
The English definitions in the gismu list have always been inherently
limited by the nature of the English language and need of defining
predicates for English-speakers.  "blue" in English is also a verb (what
"bluing" does) and it is a non-color adjective (meaning "sad", or
"indecent" or a bunch of other things).  m-w.com even lists several noun
meanings.  Beinmg specific about what the word means is a good thing.


>
>Yes, as I noted.  The point is that the ellipsis
>rules were always arbitrary and the general rule
>is regularly violated in special cases -- often
>on a word-by-word basis rather than by classes. 
>To have lost a fundamental insight of this sort
>for a specious uniformity does seem to me to have
>been a  mistake (as I argued at the time,
>indeed).
>  
>
No fundamental insight has been lost, since it is trivial to make a
brivla that has the place structure of  TLI's blanu.

>Unfortunately, the emergence of a paragon
>theory of semantics argued 
>against that.  The comparison is not "more X
>than a standard" but "more 
>like the paragon X than some arbitrary allowed
>amount of difference".
>  
>
>
>Paragon theory hardly "emerged, " having been
>around for about 2000 years and regularly refuted
>by experience. 
>
I'm referring to the results of the Kay/Kempton studies which was an
experiment that as I understood it supported the paragon theory.  But
what I meant was that having multiple views on what  "blue" meant
linguistically - comparative/paragon/scientific set of frequencies, etc.
It seemed "metaphysically parsimonious" not to assume that one of the
views as more fundamental than any other.  That's why our solution for
blanu was to DROP places rather than add "standard" and "observer" and
"conditions"

>In any case, it dealt with a
>different situation that was met with in the
>underlying linguistic logic of the base
>comparison model.  Paragon thoey has bnever been
>able to explain, for example, how blue dogs are
>blue, since they paragonically are not.
>  
>
They are presumably more like a paragon of a "blue dog" than a "non-blue
dog".  And if a "blue dog" is not in fact blue, that is not because the
paragon of blue is invalid, but the paragon of "dog" takes preeminence
of the the modifier, which in fact is something else JCB pronounced
somewhere along the way.


>  
>
>>>blue dog is a dog that is blue for a dog, not
>>>simply a dog that is (in some absolute sense)
>>>blue.  Indeed, if we went by the scientific
>>>stuff, a blue dog probably wouldn't be blue at
>>>all, being nearer to several other standard chips(or whatever test) than to blue.
>>>
If so, then in Lojban it shouldn't be called a "blue dog" but rather
whatever other standard chip applies.


>>>(they not ever getting very close to standard
>>>blues, after all) it is blue.
>>>      
>>>
It is closer to the paragon of a blue dog than it is to the paragon of a
red dog.

But of course in Lojban, we have explicitly said that we do not KNOW
what the relationship is between a modifier and its modificand in a
tanru.  The "blue for a dog" interpretation is merely one of an infinite
number of possibilities for the meaning of blanu gerku, all of which are
valid.

>>> 
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>>But that format only works for attributive
>>concepts.  Otherwise we have 
>>to deal with
>>le prenu cu jubme
>>being plausible meaning
>>That person is tablish for a person.
>>    
>>
>
>But of course {jubme} doesn't -- and never did --
>have a comparison place.  so this line is simply
>irrelevant -- unless you hold that any place any
>predicate has every predicate has to have, which
>is a bit much even for the most regularist sorts.
>  
>
We can attach any BAI place to any predicate, and using fi'o we can in
fact attach any place to any predicate.  Wioth zi'o we can remove any
place from any predicate too, so the regularists won the battle %^)  No
brivla really means anything if you can load it up with strangeness for
a place structure (X is blue fi'o se zmadu more than Y fi'o ve klama by
route Z???) .  It is the places actually filled and overtly ellipsized
(by being part of the defined place structure) that matter.

At which point I should stop since this really started out as Nora's
argument, and she may have better ideas how to clarify any disagreement
that remains, and my mind is bending in strange directions as I
contemplate the route of blue %^)

lojbab




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