proposals

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

             On the proposed changes to Lojban.
             Of course, I still like the proposal to have an afterthought
        quantifier that leaps to the head of the prenex, though I do not
        much like using x-- space for it yet.  I am also in favor -- on
        general principles -- of having afterthought everythings, so I
        support proposals for them as well, though I do not exactly see
        what they are to do.
             I do not see the other proposal about quantifiers, broadly
        speaking, namely to mark within intensional (opaque) contexts
        those sumti which were to be taken as referring outside that
        context and thus capable of being bound by external quantifiers
        (or, if quantifier expressions, capable of being exported). This
        is a piece of logical fussiness for the most part but it had the
        virtue in our discussions of legitimating some attempts to do
        such quantifying, for when this "external reference" mark comes
        together with the "subject raising" mark, they cancel to no mark,
        leaving the sumti as referring to the current realm, not the
        (hidden) remote one. This proposal got mixed with the after-
        thought quantifier proposal in some way and I failed to sort
        matters out intelligibly at the time.
             I just do not understand the continued requests for "any." I
        think I have counted seven proposals for dealing with that Eng-
        lish term in either current or moderately changed Lojban.  Almost
        all of these cover the (remarkably vague even for a dictionary)
        definition that seems to be the crux.  some cover the logic of it
        (the main Lojban concern, I suppose), other cover the psychology
        of it, most cover both.  What is still missing?
             Back to logical fussiness, I do not see anything to be
        gained by any of the current proposals about (what must be loose-
        ly called) "lambda variables." For the informal use of lambda
        expressions, as a way of talking about the function itself rather
        than a particular application, we have a more than adequate set
        of abstractors already with good conventions about what to leave
        out or fill in with variables or what not.  For the highly tech-
        nical use of lambda expressions, one variable is no where near
        enough, since the whole point of lambda conversion is to fill the
        different slots in different ways, more ore less independently of
        the ways the slots were filled in the expression you are sticking
        the lambda expression into.  So, I vote "No" on lambda proposals
        until someone does a thorough job of explaining what we want them
        for and why what we have won't do it.
             On tensors on time and space vectors, I still like the
        solution which was in place a few years ago of having one form
        which attached to the vector marker and took a metric as sumti.
        I did not see Goran's proposal which may be just that come 'round
        again, but Jorge's of revising three terms for one purpose (and
        in the process apparently losing their rather useful -- Zipfean
        -- function) will not get my vote.
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