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Re: [lojban] Lojban semantics




On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 5:30 PM, shanoxilt <osiris_hades_deathland@hotmail.com> wrote:

Here's his response:

 (Note that the "to each constant" part seems to suggest that Lojban doesn't allow the use of function symbols as a part of its syntax. It might be so or the writer just forgot their existence. Whether they are allowed or not makes a great difference on the theoretical capabilities of the language but, again, they are mostly not relevant to what I'm going to post about so I'll mostly ignore them, too).

Lojban does have a small closed class of words that correspond to function symbols of valence 1 (selmaho LAhE) and another closed class that corresponds to function symbols of valence 2 (selma'o JOI), but its main open class corresponds to predicate symbos (BRIVLA). It is however possible to construct function expressions of any valence based on the predicate words ("lo broda be ... bei ... bei ...) and constants (i.e. functions of valence 0) can also be constructed out of predicates ("lo broda"). 

 [...]
The reason why this is not a problem for Lojban speakers is that they aren't actually doing any first-order reasoning with it. They are using it in exactly the same way as they would use an ordinary language, together with all the fuzziness and imprecision of such languages. Lojban in reality is a completely ordinary language with a slightly unusual grammar.

Indeed, Lojban is used as an ordinary language, and its only peculiarity is that it was designed so that it can express first order predicate logic more or less directly.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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