Re: [lojban] Revising mu'ei and CAhA once again. Possible worlds.

[And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>]

I only found out in the last couple of years that {mu'ei} had ever attracted any attention, and I was rather surprised by that, because in the era in which they were proposed, nobody paid any attention to experimental cmavo proposals, and the notion of seeking to make Lojban a logical language was deeply marginalized.

The rationale for {mu'ei} is this:

It allows the lexicosyntactic form of conditionals to be homomorphous with the semantic form of conditionals. In particular, the PA element makes explicit the fractional quantification underlying the could/probably/would (some/most/all) scale, and the sumti it governs expresses the restriction on the set of states of affairs ("possible worlds") being quantified over, which is the protasis. The contrast between different sorts of modality (epistemic, deontic, counterfactual, noncounterfactual, futurate) could be expressed within the protasis-expressing sumti or could be lexicalized (as in the case of the ba'oi proposal).

{mu'ei} makes {ka'e} et al redundant, with {ka'e} et al merely being very slightly shorter alternatives to {mu'ei} with implicit sumti.

If you find {romu'ei} absurd, then you must have misunderstood it somehow.

I didn't really understand your remarks, but it seems to me firstly that you didn't apprehend the basic rationale for mu'ei (i.e. what its syntax makes possible) and secondly that you're erroneously trying to see it as involving not only possible worlds (your A-level) but also the actual world (your M-level), when in fact it involves only possible worlds. The structure of mu'ei is "PA mu'ei (lo du'u p is the case kei), q is the case", and mu'ei doesn't specify whether p or q are the case in the actual world. That doesn't rule out having another 8 variants of mu'ei to specify whether or not p and q are actual, tho; but maybe ca'a could be used for that -- i.e. ca'a(nai) in the protasis and/or in the apodosis.

The use of {da'i} is interesting. For a logical language it's completely deplorable, because there's a complete mismatch between the lexicosyntactic form and the logical form, and no explicit rule about how to get from one to the other -- it works by mere stipulated magic. But it caught on among those impatient to be actively using the language, and nicely illustrated the fundamental incompatibility between a loglang and a language governed by the principle of "let usage decide".

--And.

Gleki Arxokuna, On 05/08/2012 18:16:
> Continuation of http://www.lojban.org/tiki/mu'ei
> Note:This topic should be analysed from the Trivalent logic point of view as the latter also deals with Possible worlds.
> But let's get started with more simple stuff.
> mu'ei has always been a problem for me. Although the wiki was simple in describing it I felt something incomplete or illogical there.
>
> Luckily, Lojbanistan has some authority and one can always ask how others solve the same problem.
> Here is the log.
>
>     /<gleki> Do you use mu'ei in real life? Do you have any thoughts of making a more generalised abstraction that will include both mu'ei and ba'oi?/
>     /<robin>I did for a bit and then stopped; I just use {da'i} tricks now./
>     /<gleki>!!! just da'i or pada'i, su'oda'i, roda'i? how can you distinguish between ba'oi and mu'ei then?/
>     /<robin>I don't find ba'oi useful at all. Just da'i./
>     /<gleki>but how can we distinguish two meanings? i just wanna some examples how we can use da'i for each case. //If i can't use conditionals then i cant speak this language. //Conditionals are the basics. //What are your solutions for su'omu'ei, romu'ei, mu'ei. //I can clearly see differences in their meaning important when speaking. //Regardless the theory of alternate realities behind MUhEI I need words with such semantics. //ko sidju mi/
>     /<robin>So use mu'ei ? There's nothing wrong with them. su'o mu'ei is clearly ka'e. I have no idea what use ro mu'ei has; it looks totally pointless to me. Erm, as a bridi tag; as a sumti tag it's fine. Looking at http://www.lojban.org/tiki/mu'ei , for "If the train breaks down I'll be late" is {da'i mi lerci ri'a lo nu le trene cu spofu} //"If the train breaks down I might be late" is not a structure I usually have to produce, but if I did I would just use cumki ; {lo nu mi lerci cu cumki lo nu le trene cu spofu}/
>
>
> So having this absolution granted from lojbo nolraitru I started revising mu'ei.
> Here is what I came up with.
> (if you can't see the image look here <https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.233361103451814.50762.100003337779349&type=1>).
>
>
> <https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-opUzSZGQJJM/UB6pRylT1AI/AAAAAAAAB94/F4vX6jWZkDo/s1600/ka%27e.png>We have two layers. One describes alternate (possible worlds). And it's {ka'e}.
> If you have balls of one color only there are no alternate worlds. i.e. only bag in the middle has more than one output at M-level.
> Therefore I opine that mu'ei is not a good cmavo as it's trying to express two levels and therefore two meaning at once. But cmavo should express one meaning each (being more close to semantic prims).
>
> Strangely enough {pu'i} was out of consideration on mu'ei pages on lojban.org wiki. That's why mu'ei scheme is not complete and comprehensive.
>
> *Other issues including unsettled.*
> romu'ei is absurd.
> bi'ai is described as naka'ena which in my scheme is equal to {ca'a}. But actually in the examples from the wiki bi'ai is used more like {pu'i}. In any case it's meaning is covered by the existing cmavo.
> ba'oi has extra meaning of alternate world identical to This World up to the present. This meaning is yet to be defined using new cmavo if my criticism of mu'ei is accepted.
> da'i and va'o look like non-logical conditionals. Their meaning is out of my understanding. But I'm gonna use da'i more like Robin in those cases when I'm not sure what alternate-world-cmavo to use or in order to reach ambiguity.
> ka'e is used more like an abbreviation of kakne. If the latter meaning of ka'e is fixed we need to find another cmavo for that purpose (for A-level).
> naka'e has no cmavo for the output at M-level. Luckily naka'e is short enough to be used on it's own.
>
> *Conclusion.*
> mu'ei is not needed. If you wanna describe potential i.e. alternate worlds at A-level use naka'e, ka'e or naka'ena=ca'a.
> If in possible worlds some balls are black and some are white then it's ka'e that can result either in nu'o or in pu'i.
> You can use all those cmavo as sumtcita as well which staisfies the need in most conditional sentences
> (conditionals are sentences like "If I hadn't swum I would have been healthy" or similar).
>
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