Subject: Re: [lojban] the set of answers

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 2001 12:02:42 EDT

In a message dated 9/11/2001 7:52:38 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Evidently I was mistaken to think we were all engaged in the same
> programme of enquiry, then. AFAI am concernced, the aim is to find a
> logical representation for Q-kau sentences. If that turns out to be 
> reasonably
> elegant, then we could then drop qkau. If it turns out to be a bit clunky
> then we would know what qkau expands to logically.
> 

I think we are engaged in the same enterprise (at least in part -- I have no 
desire to do away with Qkau, only to understand it), but from opposite ends.  
You appear to think that questions won't be clear until they are formalized, 
I tend to thing they can't be formalized until they are clear. I am also 
pretty sure that the formalization will be unusably complex, since I can very 
little chance of avoiding moving through several levels of logic and probably 
the metalanguage: a good explanation in a scientific study of the langauge 
but not someothing anyone would say.

<Do I need to point out that English does not claim to be a logical language?
English is not Loglan.>

True, but English is a capable of being logical as Lojban and seem a fair 
test for whether indirect questions can be logically unfolded in a speakable 
human language (which Lojban is not yet provably).

<To avoid you wasting time, I'd better make clear that Jorge defined the
set of answers extensionally (i.e. by listing them all). I don't consider that
satisfactory.>

No, a list will not do, since the set may very well not be finite, given all 
the variations possible and acceptable ({xu} questions probably are finite 
sets, but theya re a special case in other ways as well).

<As I said, the analyses aren't rivals. I can't think of a formalization that 
comes closer to approximating the set of answers analysis than the
extensional analysis does, so in that sense it is a quasi-formal
restatement, and if that's what you think too then your other comments
below are hard to understand.>

I really have tried hard to read And's commentsa quasi formal versions of my 
markedly less formal ones, but the connection escapes me: I may be reading 
too much -- or the wrong things -- into the notion of extensional and I just 
may have a different picture in mind, but each of the items he produces just 
comes out wrong any way I try to interpret it (even ignoring known slips of 
the pen).  

<#  <#Well, the {makau} {ce'u} is restricted, too -- maybe more so -- since 
it 
#  #has to generate *answers*  and not every possible value will apply 
#  #(indeed, generally most will not).  Further, unlike the "bound" {ce'u},  
#  #the restrictions tend to be implicit rather than overt.  
#
#  I think this is incorrect. The extension of ka is the set of all ordered
#  n-tuples that instantiate the n ce'u  in the ka. So the ce'u are not
#  restricted.>
#  You were the one who said the extension of {ce'u} was restricted:
#  (<in {ko'u fo'u frica lo du'u ce'u prami ma kau} (in standard
# > usage), there are two variables: {ko'u fo'u frica lo du'u X prami Y}.
# > X is restricted to Dubya and Jeb (do we *have* to use Bushes in our
# > exsmples??) and Y ranges freely.>)

I say "Y ranges freely". Y is "the makau ce'u". You say "the makau ce'u
is restricted too". I say "I think this is incorrect". You reply by quoting
me saying "[the makau ce'u] ranges freely".

Or have the wires got crossed somewhere?>
Apparently. You said X, the overt {ce'u} is restricted. I said that it was 
not, although only the values for W and Jeb were sifgnificant. I said Y (the 
{makau} that you claim is also a {ce'u}) is not restricted. I said that in 
fact it is restricted and implicitly, rather than explicitly. Since you thne 
talked about {ce'u} I foolishly thought you were talking about {ce'u}, 
forgetting that you now thought {makau} was {ce'u}, and so replied to what 
you said, not to what you apparently meant. We still disagree, but at least 
I hope we now agree on what we disagree about.  
The range of the overt {ce'u} is not restricted (I say) even though only two 
values are significant for the issue at hand. The range of {makau} (you say 
a crypto{ce'u}, with which I disagree) I say is restricted in an informal and 
implicit way to those cases which make acceptable answers -- hard to describe 
in advance, though we recognize failures easily enough. It is not that all 
the possible replacements are there but do not count (as in the overt {ce'u} 
case) but that some replacements are not there at all, since, were they 
there, they would count, as things are imagined at the moment. 
I suspect that it is this latter point that is the bone of contention, since 
dealing with it my way means that a complete formalization of questions is 
impossible, except by putting in a very fuzzy predicate about acceptable 
answers, and And does not like fuzzy predicates, even when they are necessary.

<You have not shown how/that the extension-of analysis gives inappropriate
meanings that are not equivalent to interrogative or q-kau expressions. 
Jorge has attempted to do that, though without having convinced me yet.>
Hey, it's your analysis; give me a plausible case of it working, so that I 
can see whether it does or not. Every case so far has come with an attached 
"but this is not yet quite right," with which I heartily agree.

<. By my analysis of Q-kau, Y is
#  #> underlyingly ce'u -- ordinary unrestricted woldemarian ce'u. So
#  #> although I could accept your story that X is a contextually restricted
#  #> ce'u, this leaves us with free and contextually restricted ce'u in the
#  #> same bridi, and with no way to tell them apart (in logical form).>
#
#  But woldemarian {ce'u} is a lambda bound variable and {makau} is not 
#  obviously so 

So what are you telling me? That my Insight was not an obvious one...?
;-)

# -- and your problem with it suggests that is should not be so at all. > 

I think your insight is an insight and not an obvious one, but also a wrong 
one. There are a lot of similarities between {ce'u} and {ma} (with or 
without the {kau}), so that getting a good grip on one helps with the other.  
But I don't think they are the same, at least partly because of the other 
items that go with {ma}, which are not paralleled with {ce'u}. Of course, I 
am also hooked into the set-of-answers explanation (that is what Logic does, 
so I will follow up on it until it clearly doesn't work or I get an answer), 
which does not fit with the {ce'u} connection either. The fact that working 
woith both of these as {ce'u} presents you with a logical problem, suggests 
to me that the assumption you are working with (that they both are {ce'u}) is 
likely wrong. Of course, I see the restricted and unrestricted sorted in the 
opposite way, but that doesn't change the problem.
There is a problem with {kau} and {ce'u}, having to do with which gets 
expanded first (i.e. a scope problem, if you will), since some situations 
seem to favor one expansion, others the other. I have been solving that ad 
hoc so far, but that can't continue, especially if the whole is to be 
formalized at all.