| In a message dated 4/17/2001 8:50:52 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: la pycyn cusku di'e Force of habit: first semester logic dislike quantifiers in predicate position. <Avoiding {du} is always good Lojban practice, though.> Why would"the logical language" want to do away with a central part of the language of logic? Neither {mintu} nor {me} are as well defined. <>{me le mlatu} gets a bit fuzzy, though both might be true if there were >several cats and they all liked the chair, No! If there were more than one cat, at least {du} would not be true! Each of the cats would not be = each of the likers. Each cat would only equal one of the likers.> Sorry, I forgot that one of the changes that shouldn't have happened was the rule about implicit quantifiers: we got it backwards from the standard. <>So >noda poi na du le mlatu cu nelci leva stizu. Or more succintly: no nardu'o be le mlatu cu nelci le va stizu But that doesn't say that the cat does like it, which was part of the original claim.> Actually the first is the same length and clearer. And, of course(here we go on this one again) "only Ss are Ps" does not imply that even a single S is P, only that nothing else is. If {po'o} adds the exisatential condition, it is triply misleading instead of only doubly. <I never really bought that UIs don't affect truth values. At least some of them certainly do. In any case, all your objections to {po'o} would also apply to {ji'a}.> The ones that do, if there are any, are the same bastard creations as {po'o}. {ji'a}, however, does not change truth values, so is not a case in point. <. Not the Lojban plan, >as >originally written nor even as revised in the Book. I can't say I know what those plans are. {po'o} is not one of the many cmavo that I would banish from the language... :)> Some place in the Book (well-buried so far as my quick search just now goes) is the line -- going back to the first, 1959, edition of Loglan 1 -- about making inferences as transparent as possible, bringing out the logical structure of the statement, and so on. {po'o} doesn't do that butrather misleads and muddles. Too bad it is not on your list; the ones that are rarely have those peculiar properties, however useless they may be. cowan: <> But of course, the first case being non-unique is not just a discourse > function but a logical and factual one and so belongs in the the > truth-functional realms It *can* belong there. But in this construction I judge we are dealing with a rhetorical emphasis, quite unlike "Not only farmers are fishers." = "Some non-farmers are fishers", where its function is clearly logical.> Everyone else seems to be taking it as a factual, not merely a rhetorical claim; what is your basis for the different view -- other than the use of {po'o} in the translations? Not that I am clear on what the "rhetorical use" of "only" is -- beyond restricting the universe of discourse. |