RE: Some peripheral notes on Legalese Lojban

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

> From: Pycyn@aol.com
>
> Actually not on the legalese part at all, but on some remarks that were made
> in the discussion.
> 1) Just Predicate Calculus.  As & showed in his own examples, this is just
> not enough.  Even patents (maybe especially) need a) second order predicates
> (take predicates or propositions as arguments) and probably second order
> quantifiers (though there are technical tricks around both of these which
> only occasionally screw up an inference) and b) intensional contexts
> (hypothetical situations, for a minimal example).

What are the technical tricks?

> 2) This realization -- late 50's and early 60's -- led JCB to move from his
> original program to a richer language (though one without -- thank
> God -- all
> the typographical stuff of L1960).  This was still within his SW project,
> since he came to see that he had to have alnaguage the speaker could fully
> inhabit, not merely use for a few hours in an artificial project situation,
> to give the hypothesis a real test.
>   Many of the features that were added grew out of his own and others'
> efforts to inhabit the language for real life situations.  Even the small
> number of rather limited efforts in that direction (a few dozen stretches of
> an hour or so in Loglan only, some attempts to teach various infants in
> Loglan) pointed to still further needs.  Even more came from attempts to
> translate both literature and ordinary texts -- though many of the
> innovations first sought for these proved to be unnecessary, resulting from
> inadequate creativity in using available resources (and from incredibly odd
> choices in what to try to translate for starters).

I was definitely wrong then, but the original goals must have got very
thoroughly lost sight of. I'd have thought that during the design phase
the question should always have been asked "Can this be dispensed with?",
and if the answer was Yes, then only very good reasons ought to have
saved it from being dispensed with.

--And.