Re: da blanu de

[Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group <lojbab@lojban.org>]

At 10:30 AM 4/22/99 -0500, Steven Belknap wrote:
>From: Steven Belknap <sbelknap@uic.edu>
>
>>The new "by standard..." does not solve that problem, nor does appeal to
>>general paradigm cases.  But people seem to get by just by using the rule
>>they use in English (or whatever), which is what the original insight was an
>>attempt to make explicit.
>>pc
>
>I certainly agree with pc that the "by standard" place does not completely
>resolve the problem of what we mean by <da blanu de>. The dialectic
>regarding this issue seems to drift aimlessly, never being resolved
>definitively. Some time ago I suggested that this dilemma might be an
>instance of circular definition or failure to acknowledge axioms.

No, it is a dilemma of explcitly acknowledging a complex set of competing
axioms, with no way to choose among them.  Faced with the fact that we use
color words in a variety of ways which imply a variety of oblique places,
we chose to decide that none were obligatory and that any could be added
using BAI tags.

>Color is a particularly vexing issue, as it has cultural determinants. We
>apparently do *not* all agree on what blue <blanu> is. So leaving it is an
>undefined term is problematic.

We agree on what color "blue" refers to more or less, but we do not agree
as to whether something is blue is dependent on a standard, on additive or
subtractive color formulae, whether it is observer dependent (if a
colorblind person sees only black and white, does that mean that nothing is
blue?), whether blue is determined by prototype, by a spectral range, how
much of the mass of the object is blue (a blue house does not normally have
every square inch of its surface in that color).

The ONLY thing we seem to agree about blanu is the relationship between the
x1 and the concept "blue", so a truthful place structure for blanu might be
"x1 pertains to some concept of the color blue".

The right way to solve the problem is to add BAI places as needed.  This
could have been done for other gismu as well, but it is a clumsiness to be
avoided where possible.

lojbab
----
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