Subject: Re: [lojban] A revised ce'u proposal involving si'o

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 09 Sep 2001 21:30:16 -0400

Pardon my not replying earlier, but due to overload in getting my kids 
started at school, I'm around 2 weeks and 300 messages behind in even 
SKIMMING Lojban List.

At 03:14 PM 8/24/01 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>In a message dated 8/24/2001 12:02:09 PM Central Daylight Time,
>[email-masked] writes:
>>while {si'o} belongs with {nu} and {li'i} as concrete real world
>>#(whatever that may be) events.
>>
>>Not in actual usage, AFAICS.
>
>there isn't enough actual usage to tell much

A point I have been trying to stress whenever I say "let usage 
decide". Usage will not have decided while there are still only a handful 
of people competent enough at the easy stuff that they are willing to essay 
using the more complex or abstract ones. And I daresay there are a lot of 
people who might USE the language more if they could successfully pull 
themselves away from the endless arguments ABOUT the language.

> and what little there is is
>unclear, open to any of the available interpretations. I think the
>"individual mental event" reading works best in most cases and not too badly
>in all.
>
><Given its gloss and its membership in NU, there are two sensical
>interpretations of si'o.

Membership in a selma'o may imply NOTHING about its semantics. Membership 
in NU means only that it serves as the head of a phrase that includes a 
bridi and is terminated by a possibly elidable kei.

> One where it belongs with du'u and ka,
>and one where it belongs with li'i.

How about one where it stands by itself, developing its own meaning? A si'o 
abstraction "means" NOTHING other than that which fills the x1 of sidbo, a 
ka abstraction is an x2 of ckaji and a few other predicates, a ni 
abstraction is an x1 of klani, a sedu'u is an x2 of cusku. Deciding what 
place structures applied to these abstractions did some constraining of the 
meanings, but relatively little. Arguing whether a si'o is a kind of ka is 
a philosophical argument, of the sort that can never be settled, because it 
hinges on whether one is willing to consider an idea to be a characteristic 
of something (i.e., is the x1 of sidbo an x2 of ckaji?) We are NOT going 
to agree, and the argument is therefore fruitless.

> The intepretations are incompatible

Only in accord with some philosophies. Other philosophies can reconcile 
the irreconcilable.

If {si'o}, a person's ideas, are {ka}-like then they are functions of some
>sort, not events at all -- the events being at most function detectors, like
>observed colors are function detectors for say {ka ce'u xunre} and reality is
>thus all in the uniform metalanguage. On the other hand, if the proposal is
>to make {ka} and the like just like {si'o}, personal mental events, the all
>is reduced to the contents of an individual consciousness, my experiences,
>say.

Saying more or less what I said. Equating the places of two different 
predicates in some absolute manner serves as a metaphysical restriction on 
how we look at the universe. Lojban tries to avoid such metaphysical 
constraints. Semantic conventions are thus to some extent bad things if 
they are rationalized, because the rationalization will always be in view 
of some particular metaphysical outlook.

And:
> > Your
> > {ka}-{du'u} reading can be done with better conventions about {ka} and 
> {du'u}
>
>You and anybody else are welcome to explain what these better conventions are.
>Until you do so, and the explanations survive scrutiny, we have a license to
>suppose that there are no better conventions.

The best convention is no convention at all. Let conventions, if they must 
exist, develop through converging usage, representing what people do in 
order to make themselves understood to each other. That is the ONLY way we 
can find out what an "idea abstraction" is, to see what people can manage 
to communicate using it.

> > (and Lord knows there are enough offered for your choice.)
>
>You don't seem to realize that they were all attempts to reconcile conflicting
>desiderata.

Correct, and we don't even know if we have all of the desiderata out on the 
table yet (and will not know until people have made more effort to try to 
apply things).

>They aren't all on a par, competing with one another. They're
>attempts to converge on the best solution.

I refuse to negotiate meanings of Lojban words in English because I think 
it is impossible to do so, and probably undesirable to try (and 
unfortunately at this point I don't have time to do it by USING them in 
Lojban (talking about them in Lojban won't necessarily improve on talking 
about them in English).

>I would need you to come up with decent illustrative sentences if you want
>to persuade me that the predicate for expressing someone's mental events
>has to be in NU.

It has to be in NU because that is the way that sidbo is defined - it 
requires a predication in x1, and NU is the grammatical apparatus for 
taking a predication as a whole and inserting it in a sumti without 
necessarily focussing on exactly one place of that predication in the way 
that LE does.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org