Re: A modest proposal #2: verdicality

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

To answer the question about veridicality takes some history.  Old TLI Lojban
does not have "lo".  It has only "le".  It also has confusion %^).  pc and I
made a kind of table of all the distinctions that were embedded implicitly
in the Loglan articles, and came up with what we have now.  Specifically
(caps refer to TLI Loglan words, not selma'o)

LE   corresponds to le or lo, and is definite and specific, except when it
     isn't %^)
LO   is Lojban loi - the mass of all things meeting the description.  Except
     for the one example translated as "the two men (together) carried the
     log across the field, for which JCB used LO implying loi, but Lojban
     would use lei.

This was all there was in early TLI Loglan (~ 1974).
Then was added restrictive relative clauses for what might be called
veridical descriptions.  This goes well with Jorge's argument that "lo"
shoudl be euqivalent to "da poi".  For many years the equivalent of da poi
broda was the way to express a veridical individual.  The problem came
with numbers of individuals, or the "SE SORME" (= ze mensi) question.  JCB
was convinced that quantified descriptions were natural without an explicit
article like "le".  He waffled back and forth between allowing and
disallowing "ze mensi" (equiavlent).  He also was wishy washy as to what it
meant when it was used:  sometimes "le ze mensi" sometimes "ze le mensi"
sometimes ze da poi mensi.

In the late 1970s, pc and others attempted to nail down default quantifiers
for the existing Loglan articles, at a time when SE SORME was not a legal
sumti, and came up with what is essentially the system today.  When JCB
decided that he could not live without the SE SORME concept, he made it
work with YACC grammar, but never defined what it meant in terms of quantifiers.
Then in 1986, when at the first DC LogFest we were reviewing JCB's draft
essay on the state of the language (which became _Notebook 3_, 1987), we
decided that it had to be "ze da poi mensi".  All this was pre-Lojban.

Meanwhile in the late 70s, there was proposed some auxiliary articles LEA
(the set of all those meeting the description) and others.  But the usage
of LEA was not as a "Set", but rather was identical to what we now use as
"ro lo" - used in making universal statements about veredicals.  He also
added an article LOE for "the typical".

In Oct 86, when I visited pc still working on the TLI Loglan dictionary, I
was trying to make sense of all these articles, and especially of the reasoning
behind the default quantifiers.  "LEA" was clearly dealing with veridicality,
and we recognized that the two usages of LO were respectively veridical and
non veridical.  Thus, when JCB's copyright claim on the words was made a couple
of months later, and I started reinventing the words, the first iteration
was what is now lo/le loi/lei, but with the outer quantifier on "lo" being
"ro" and not the current "su'o".  Meanwhile we had also recognized that there
was still the issue of "sets" - the supposed defintion of "LEA" that did not
match JCB's usage - that would be used in talking about set properties like
cardinality.  So we added "lo'i/le'i" recognizing that we had a good
pattern going.

We tried to fit the other Lojban articles into this scheme, and found they
worked well.  Hence where JCB had only "LA" (= la), we added la/lai/la'i.
And where JCB had "lo'e", I had to decide whether this belonged in the
veridicals or the non-veridicals (le'e or lo'e) and relaized that there was
a plausible meaning for either, so we added both.

pc and I then hammered out default quantifiers for all of these in several
2 hour long phone calls, with Nora by then getting involved as well since
she had moved in with me.  Until Jorge came along, people thought that our
systenm was perhaps overkill, but there weren;t any logical holes in it
(though we kept getting the default quantifiers mixed up, and had to work them
out repeatedly from first principles).

We chose the current quantifiers for "lo" when I found in actually trying
to use the language that I hardly ever wanted to make a universal claim
about all brodas - that may be something logicians do, but if you are
concerned about making true statements about the real world, it is not wise to
make universals.  Far more natural seeming was the default quantifier
su'o lo ro.  It also conveniently sidestepped the "SE SORME" question
because most such usages were indefinite veridical, and "ze mensi" thus
would equate to "ze lo [ro] mensi".  It was only later that we had people
argue that "ze mensi" might refer to nonveridicals "= le ze mensi".

"lo" thus drifted towards being similar to English indefinite, but with that
stressed veridicality that was LEA's primary reason for existence, so that
you could make a universal claim about brodas succintsly with "rolo".  It was
not until Cowan and I had an argument about "lo xanri" (which led to a
change in the definition of xanri) that anyone ever questioned the usefulness
and/or importance of veridicality as the central criterion of the "lo" series
- even more than the non-specificity.  Indeed, usage came to allow "lo" to
be used rarely as a specific, with some fats-talking words about implicit
restrictions.  Nowadays, I think the argument has been made that such
implicit restrictions constitute a limitation of the universe of discourse
so that "lo broda" becomes "su'o da poi broda" to all intents and purposes.
And the SE SORME question has come full circle so that it can mean either
"ze da poi mensi" or "ze lo mensi" because the two are essentially the same
in meaning.

But if we eliminate veridicality as the central tenet for the lo/lo'V series,
I am not sure that there is any justification for it to exist at all.

lojbab