| In a message dated 9/11/2001 7:52:38 AM Central Daylight Time,
arosta@uclan.ac.uk writes: Evidently I was mistaken to think we were all engaged in the same I think we are engaged in the same enterprise (at least in part -- I have no desire to do away with Qkau, only to understand it), but from opposite ends. You appear to think that questions won't be clear until they are formalized, I tend to thing they can't be formalized until they are clear. I am also pretty sure that the formalization will be unusably complex, since I can very little chance of avoiding moving through several levels of logic and probably the metalanguage: a good explanation in a scientific study of the langauge but not someothing anyone would say. <Do I need to point out that English does not claim to be a logical language? English is not Loglan.> True, but English is a capable of being logical as Lojban and seem a fair test for whether indirect questions can be logically unfolded in a speakable human language (which Lojban is not yet provably). <To avoid you wasting time, I'd better make clear that Jorge definedthe set of answers extensionally (i.e. by listing them all). I don't consider that satisfactory.> No, a list will not do, since the set may very well not be finite, given all the variations possible and acceptable ({xu} questions probably are finite sets, but theya re a special case in other ways as well). <As I said, the analyses aren't rivals. I can't think of a formalization that comes closer to approximating the set of answers analysis than the extensional analysis does, so in that sense it is a quasi-formal restatement, and if that's what you think too then your other comments below are hard to understand.> I really have tried hard to read And's commentsa quasi formal versions of my markedly less formal ones, but the connection escapes me: I may be reading too much -- or the wrong things -- into the notion of extensional and I just may have a different picture in mind, but each of the items he producesjust comes out wrong any way I try to interpret it (even ignoring known slips of the pen). <# <#Well, the {makau} {ce'u} is restricted, too -- maybe moreso -- since it # #has to generate *answers* and not every possible value will apply # #(indeed, generally most will not). Further, unlike the "bound"{ce'u}, # #the restrictions tend to be implicit rather than overt. # # I think this is incorrect. The extension of ka is the set of all ordered # n-tuples that instantiate the n ce'u in the ka. So the ce'u arenot # restricted.> # You were the one who said the extension of {ce'u} was restricted: # (<in {ko'u fo'u frica lo du'u ce'u prami ma kau} (in standard # > usage), there are two variables: {ko'u fo'u frica lo du'u X prami Y}. # > X is restricted to Dubya and Jeb (do we *have* to use Bushes in our # > exsmples??) and Y ranges freely.>) I say "Y ranges freely". Y is "the makau ce'u". You say "the makau ce'u is restricted too". I say "I think this is incorrect". You reply by quoting me saying "[the makau ce'u] ranges freely". Or have the wires got crossed somewhere?> Apparently. You said X, the overt {ce'u} is restricted. I said that it was not, although only the values for W and Jeb were sifgnificant. I said Y (the {makau} that you claim is also a {ce'u}) is not restricted. I said that in fact it is restricted and implicitly, rather than explicitly. Since youthne talked about {ce'u} I foolishly thought you were talking about {ce'u}, forgetting that you now thought {makau} was {ce'u}, and so replied to what you said, not to what you apparently meant. We still disagree, but at least I hope we now agree on what we disagree about. The range of the overt {ce'u} is not restricted (I say) even though only two values are significant for the issue at hand. The range of {makau} (you say a crypto{ce'u}, with which I disagree) I say is restricted in an informal and implicit way to those cases which make acceptable answers -- hard to describe in advance, though we recognize failures easily enough. It is notthat all the possible replacements are there but do not count (as in the overt {ce'u} case) but that some replacements are not there at all, since, were they there, they would count, as things are imagined at the moment. I suspect that it is this latter point that is the bone of contention, since dealing with it my way means that a complete formalization of questionsis impossible, except by putting in a very fuzzy predicate about acceptable answers, and And does not like fuzzy predicates, even when they are necessary. <You have not shown how/that the extension-of analysis gives inappropriate meanings that are not equivalent to interrogative or q-kau expressions. Jorge has attempted to do that, though without having convinced me yet.> Hey, it's your analysis; give me a plausible case of it working, so that I can see whether it does or not. Every case so far has come with an attached "but this is not yet quite right," with which I heartily agree. <. By my analysis of Q-kau, Y is # #> underlyingly ce'u -- ordinary unrestricted woldemarian ce'u.So # #> although I could accept your story that X is a contextually restricted # #> ce'u, this leaves us with free and contextually restricted ce'u in the # #> same bridi, and with no way to tell them apart (in logical form).> # # But woldemarian {ce'u} is a lambda bound variable and {makau} is not # obviously so So what are you telling me? That my Insight was not an obvious one...? ;-) # -- and your problem with it suggests that is should not be so at all. > I think your insight is an insight and not an obvious one, but also a wrong one. There are a lot of similarities between {ce'u} and {ma} (with or without the {kau}), so that getting a good grip on one helps with the other. But I don't think they are the same, at least partly because of the other items that go with {ma}, which are not paralleled with {ce'u}. Ofcourse, I am also hooked into the set-of-answers explanation (that is what Logic does, so I will follow up on it until it clearly doesn't work or I get an answer), which does not fit with the {ce'u} connection either. The fact that working woith both of these as {ce'u} presents you with a logical problem, suggests to me that the assumption you are working with (that they both are {ce'u}) is likely wrong. Of course, I see the restricted and unrestricted sorted in the opposite way, but that doesn't change the problem. There is a problem with {kau} and {ce'u}, having to do with which gets expanded first (i.e. a scope problem, if you will), since some situations seem to favor one expansion, others the other. I have been solving that ad hoc so far, but that can't continue, especially if the whole is to be formalized at all. |