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Re: [lojban] Lojban semantics




On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 8:40 PM, shanoxilt <osiris_hades_deathland@hotmail.com> wrote:

You can make it work exactly as in first-order logic if you want. But I'm probably not understanding what the issue is.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


They throw a fit every time Lojban is mentioned for some reason. He thinks it can't be a logical language unless the gismu are defined with formal semantics.

There's nothing to stop him from doing that. With the usual formalism predicates are just arbitrary letters, so you can assign the corresponding functions to them more or less at random, whereas in Lojban the predicates are words that will want to keep some consistency across interpretations, but you can provide any given interpretation in exactly the same way you would do it with the usual language of letters and symbols. If you wanted to, you could use "broda xi pa", "broda xi re", and so forth instead  and forget the standard meanings of brivla. Also you have some considerations such that if the speaker is a member of D, then you will want to assign it to the constant "mi", not to the constant "do", and so forth, but that seems to be beside the point. You are not forced to use those "predetermined" constants if you don't want, you can just use "ko'a xi pa", "ko'a xi re" and so on. An interpretation is basically just an assignment of a member of the universe of discourse D to each constant and of a function from D^n into {true, false} to each predicate.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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