RE: On international applications of Lojban

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

> From: John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
>
> And Rosta wrote:
>
> > I doubt that it was the simplicity per se that was the problem. The
> > cumbersomeness probably would be a problem.
>
> Yes.  The world being a complex place, simplicity somewhere must be
> compensated for by complexity somewhere else.

It is the complexity of thought that counts more, I think, partly because
we could see more, or less, complexity in the world than we in fact do,
and partly because much of the complexity inheres in thought rather than
the world.

And one must also bear in mind that not all complexity is compensatory.
Some is entirely inutile.

> > The little evidence available to me would indicate that lawyers are in fact
> > shockingly ignorant of lexical semantics even though they practise a
> > variety of it themselves.
>
> Which is compensated for by everyone else's shocking ignorance of law.

I suppose my aghastness at lawyers and the law is parallelled by intelligent
nonlinguists' aghastness at formal and in particular Chomskyan linguistics.
In each case, the outsider thinks "how can intelligent insiders be so *daft*!",
and in each case the insiders and outsiders are probably each half-right.

> > A good legal language should have an apparatus
> > for defining words and for indicating how well-defined words are.
>
> Lawyers are, from this viewpoint, semantic practitioners.  Legal *theorists*,
> OTOH, have generally realized the hopelessness of arriving at definitions
> of words using words.

My even more limited exposure to legal theorists (i.e. being interviewed on
TV, where the medium contrives to conceal the intelligence of everyone) has
created a much less negative impression on me. As far as I can tell, though,
these legal theorists don't actually have any effect on the law.

Re the hopelessness of arriving at definitions of words using words. There
are two different problems. The problem of something describing itself,
and the problem of arriving at definitions of words. The former problem is
more philosophical than practical; evading it (e.g. by using pictures)
does not help with the second problem. And lots of good and bad work in
lexical semantics has shown that the former problem does not make the
latter intractable. (The value of the bad work is in the way that by
comparison it shows the good to be better.) Even if no definition is ever
complete, an incomplete definition is better than none. For example,
if 'sexual relations' entail 'penetration culminating in ejaculation', then
at least the issue of whether or not X had sexual relations reduces to
how many millimetres and millilitres (a) count as penetration and ejaculation
and (b) occurred. In other words, the virtue of a definition of concept C is
that it tells you which questions to ask in order to answer the question "Is X
a C?".

As for Newman's arguments, as described by Strachey, they sound pretty
ropey to me. For reasoning to be jesuitical does not necessarily make
it correct, and for jesuiticality to be possible does not make its
incorrectness impossible.

--And.