Subject: Re: [lojban] the set of answers

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 15 Sep 2001 13:00:57 EDT

In a message dated 9/14/2001 8:09:01 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Not a problem. From my perspective, the two sides of a logical language are
> to be crystal clear about the logical structure of sentences and to provide
> satisfactorily concise sentences. I'm perfectly happy if qkau turns out to
> be the concisest mode of expression; all that currently concerns me is that
> we should be crystal clear about the logical structure of qkau sentences.
> 

OK, I like that thought (though I doubt that crystal clarity can be achieved).

<If you mean that you can't see my formalizations as formalizations of the
set of answers analysis, then that's fair enough, and you need either
to accept my formalization and drop the set of answers analysis or else to
seek another formalization.

If you mean that my formalizations are not semantically (truthconditionally,
let's say) adequate formalizations of qkau/interrogative sentences, then
this should be proved by citing instances of truthconditional nonequivalence.>

Hard to do until we look at all the contexts. It does not seem to work on 
{ko'a krici le du'u makau klama}, since who ko'a believes to go may not 
indeed go. I suppose there is a patch for this, though I don't know what it 
is. We will look at other cases as they arise.

<I sort of understand now roughly what your general position is, but I still
can't make sense of it. For "Dubya and Chelsea differ in who their mother
is" (or its proper logical or Lojban equivalent), I don't see either why
"who" is restricted or why "their" is unrestricted>
"Who" is restricted because the only usable arguments are human females of 
the present and recent past and..., "their" is of course restricted, but the 
{ce'u} that emerges from it is not, since they differ with respect to the 
whole function -- the difference only emergees in the particular case, but 
the function runs through its entire set of arguments.

<If you can find my original statement of the analysis, you'll see that those
caveats applied to "depend" and "differ" qkau constructions. That's why
the message header said it was an ungeneralized analysis. I haven't issued
any assurances that the analysis is correct, but it's the only formalization
proposed so far that hasn't been shown to be inadequate.>

OK. Well, set of answers works smoothly for those two cases, as outlined 
elsewhere in the message being quoted. Of course, you can argue it is not 
formalized, but it is up to trivial objections. And it is done within a 
general system. I don't claim that it is correct beyond the implicit one in 
pursuing it, but I haven't seen functioning objections to it yet either.

As for a plausible case of it working, what do you want? The normal strategy
we employ in our discussions is to present reasons why an analysis fails.
Analyses that resist falsification are accepted as correct.>

The reason why analysis fails is that it does not provide a correct analysis 
(one that works out right according to some pretest sense of what the 
analysis should do) of a case. So, we have to look at cases. So far 
set-of-answers is ahead on points, working for {dunli, frica, djuno, krici} 
and the menu problem, while extension works well for {djuno}, not for 
{krici}, and questionably for the rest.

<I'm surprised at this objection. Do you really think that non-ma questions
can't be restructured so that they contain a ma? And even if your answer
were Yes, would there not equally be a case for a ce'u counterpart of
non-ma q-words?>

Of course we can reformulate to just use {ma}, though provbing that we had 
exactly the same thing as before might be difficult without already having a 
general solution to the Q-kau issue. And we can, of course, introduce lambda 
operators of higher levels. The point is just that I don't see the need to 
if the solution doesn't require it -- and I don't see it doing so.

<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.

If you're talking about the two variables in the "differ in who they love"
construction, then I do not assume that the "they" element is a ce'u.>

Ah. What is it then that it gives you a two-ce'u problem?