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Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
John E Clifford wrote:
JCB had at least one course in Logic but in a school that did not favor modal
logic at all. I don't know how well he did in even that one (Lojbab does not
improve the logic input much).
Actually, I had less than JCB and probably did worse. I had only one
13-week logic course, which I would have flunked if the instructor had
been rigid. He let me have an incomplete, and I got my grade up to a D
after 2 more months. Even that says very little. It was a mastery
course, so getting a D meant that I completed only something like 60-70%
of the modules and never was even exposed to the rest. For what I did
cover, I had the mechanics down (though I forgot them within a few
months), but the abstract concepts never really sunk in.
And nothing in the course, even the part I did not cover, likely dealt
with the stuff that comes up here, though I thought I followed your
explanations in our correspondence and occasional discussions back in
the 80s when this stuff was created in Lojban.
(Nora, a math major, also only had one class, but did very well in it,
so her advisor suggested that she take philosophy instead of a second
class.)
Bearing my ignorance in mind, I contribute the following based on what I
thought I understood 20 years ago.
But in 56 years, the efforts to get necessity
operators in have come to naught -- though eventually we got something like a
necessity predicate,
Hey - I added what pc said we needed %^) I don't recall that JCB at the
time even had the CAhA family, but rather that I added it because of a
discussion pc provided explaining about "timeless" tense, i.e. "cu".
Examples such as whether a kid who has never been in a pool "is a
swimmer" and the meaning of "flammable" are the sorts of things I recall.
I probably still have pc's correspondence on the matter.
I associate "necessity operator" with ni'i (in BAI), and not with any of
the ka'e/CAhA family.
Almost all CV(')V cmavo have the same form of a rafsi of something. My
guess is the ones that are related to that something are in the
minority. "ka'e" was obviously taken from "kakne", yes, but the
connection is kind of malglico. Similarly "pe'i" comes from "pensi",
"ti'e" from "tirna", and thare are other mnemonics that go through
malglico glosses.
Right, but with e.g. {pi'o}, it's a no-brainer that the cmavo has
nothing to do with pianos despite sharing {pipno}'s rafsi's form.
With {ka'e}, one would not think it was such an accident. In
principle of course no cmavo need to be related to the gismu with that
cmavo's form.
It wasn't an accident, and it is news to me that ka'e is more like cumki
than kakne. IIRC, ka'e was supposed to be the actuality neutral
combination of pu'i (can and has) and nu'o (can and has not). A
contradictory negation of a ka'e sentence would seem to give its opposite.
Meanwhile, vlasisku, BPFK section
CAhA, cmavo.txt and the CLL say nothing about {cumki} wrt {ka'e}.
In jbovlaste "ka'e" is defined as "fi'o se cumki". But since I wrote
that definition I guess I can't count that as evidence. :)
It's only in the Lojban record! Side note: which should I rely on
more, vlasisku or jbovlaste? I find vlasisku's cross linking and more
complete search results to be superior. If someone rolled in the
BPFK definitions and CLL sections, it would be almost ideal.
So far as I know, jbovlaste is not official about anything. cmavo are
defined by CLL, and only by CLL, since the LogFlash cmavo lists were
deemed inadequate. One of the main reasons we did not have a dictionary
a long time ago was that I had no good idea how to create good
dictionary-style cmavo definitions.
I've never reviewed any jbovlaste definitions (not being fond of
web-interfaces in general, I want a real dictionary %^)
Also, while {cumki} does express possibility, {ka'e}, from the given
definitions, seems to be more about ability than possibility.
But whose ability? Each of the arguments of the relation modified by
"ka'e"? The x1? The agent (assuming there is one)?
You're asking me?! Well since you asked, from what I see, I would
definitely assume the x1, given the glosses, proposed keywords, and
examples in the CLL and BPFK.
That was the intent (or rather the "subject" rather than x1, since you
could access the x2 with "se brivla" etc), though I admit that I didn't
and still don't really understand why it couldn't apply to one of the
other places.
If I make a ka'e capability claim involving all the places of klama,
then the claim applies just as much to the place gone to as to the
go-er. If I can go to a place (from somewhere else by some route), then
that place can be gone to by me, and likewise, if I cannot, then it
cannot.
> In particular the CLL examples indicate
very clearly that {ka'e} and related CAhA are some sort of short-scope
selbri modifiers and emphatically _not_ true modal operators with
scope over the whole bridi.
I won't claim to know the difference.
In
order to say things like "it possibly brodas" and "it necessarily
brodas" I have to believe that these concepts should have their own
words, without mixing ability into it.
I agree that the word "ability" should not appear in the definition of
CAhAs, since events don't really have abilities.
It's not just "ability" that seems off, it's also the ambiguous "can"
and "innate capability" as well as the conspicuous absence of "may",
"might" and above all "POSSIBLE".
"possible" (cumki) seems to ONLY be about events, whereas I thought ka'e
and CAhA was more about the sumti that participate in the events. Maybe
there isn't a lot of difference, though.
These primitive logical
operators strike me as vastly worth assigning two disyllables from
cmavo space, especially in light of some of the other things
available. Just my 2 cents.
I agree. I have said before that it is extremely weird that a logical
language doesn't have a word for the "necessarily" operator.
The fact that there is no necessity operator strongly suggests that
the language designers did not have the foggiest notion of modal logic
when they created {ka'e}.
Or maybe pc and I understood at the time that necessity was not
something covered in CAhA, (since I am pretty sure he has *at least* a
"foggiest notion".)
Clearly I do need to dig out that old correspondence, and see if this
was one of those topics that he set down in writing rather than
explained to me over the phone.
lojbab
--
Bob LeChevalier lojbab@lojban.org www.lojban.org
President and Founder, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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