On Thu, Jan 3, 2013 at 4:47 PM, Ian Johnson
<blindbravado@gmail.com> wrote:
No. I think it should mean exactly three. The difference is that I think "exactly three" should only be considered within context. If we're talking about the house next door, and I say {ci prenu} = {ci da poi prenu}, it should mean that there are exactly three people in the context of the house next door, not that there are exactly three people, in the whole of time and space, real and imagined, etc..., whatever the scope of "universe of discourse" is.
This answer isn't really {na go'i} so much as {na'i}. I was saying to choose a fixed universe of discourse, then decide what an outer quantifier means. In other words I wanted to simplify the issue of outer quantifiers by decoupling it from the issue of determining the universe of discourse. You're saying that the universe of discourse shrinks and expands rapidly from sentence to sentence, and that the idea of holding one constant isn't reasonable. I think this is troubling in general, partly because everything done in logic depends on a background universe of discourse. In other words the first thing you do is say what you're talking about precisely (for example, the real number system), and then you start saying things about it. Rejecting this idea is sa'u illogical, but not necessarily irrational nor necessarily damaging.
I would say situation to situation, not sentence to sentence, because context isn't determined by what is said, but by the environment it is said in. Strictly speaking "environment" isn't really the right word, but you can't define context as "context".
And as far as logic wrt Lojban is concerned, Lojban is logical only in the sense that its grammar is built from predicate logic. Beyond that, it is no more nor less logical than any other language.
My problem with making the "verbosity and precision correlate tightly" doctrine into law is that precise statements all vanish for being too verbose. It's like pedantic English, you can be very careful in English if you try really hard, but we don't speak that way, and those that try are criticized for sounding awkward.
I'm not sure that's true, and I'm not certain that's really much of a problem if it is. I highly doubt that requiring more words to be more precise- which, by the way, is already true in the vast majority of Lojban as it is- automatically makes higher precision statements cease to be made.
I phrased that the way I phrased it for a reason. Insisting that verbosity and precision correlate tightly makes it so every precise statement is necessarily verbose. I think part of the point of Lojban is that logic cleanly and succinctly expresses certain ideas (quantifiers, for example, and in particular ro, su'o, and to a lesser extent pa), and by reworking ordinary language carefully we can bring everyday ideas into that structure.
I don't like the phrase "every precise statement is necessarily verbose". I would agree with "more precise statements are necessarily more verbose", however. A tight correlation means that the desired amount of precision would require a higher degree of verbosity, but not that every precise statement would be too verbose to actually be used, which is what it seems you are asserting.
I also don't think your comparison with English is very on the ball, but that's neither here nor there.
It's an exaggeration, but I think the basic point is valid. That is, once you get to a certain level of verbosity, your listener tunes out. The threshold is probably higher in Lojban because the grammar is both simpler and less obtrusive, but it's still there.
Well, certainly. I just don't think it's as big a problem as you seem to. Also, what I'm suggesting isn't a radical change from the way things are: the vast majority of Lojban does have a strong correlation between verbosity and precision, I'm just saying this correlation should be "all", not "most".