Subject: Re: [lojban] tu'o usage

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2002 16:51:20 EDT

In a message dated 9/23/2002 9:31:10 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> la pycyn cusku di'e
> 
> >All of the supposed complications are exactly paralleled for your system,
> 
> Not really. In my system, ro = no naku = naku su'o naku = naku me'iro.
> Some of those don't work with other systems. That's what makes them
> complicated
>>
What won't work? And, by the way, which of the half dozen systems I have 
suggested and played with (including what I take is now yours) is being 
labelled "pc's system?"

<<>and
>more likely to need to be used there, since the non-importing {ro} is less
>common in actual usage than the importing.

How can you tell? In most usage we don't deal with empty sets,
so it makes no difference. A clearly non-importing case would
be saying something like "the only world where every politician
is honest is a world with no politicians" (we don't like
politicians much around here these days).
Do you know a place where they do (I can't remember what hand-in-the-till or 
bumping-off-opponents ploy Argentina has been through most recently)?
I take the fact that we don't usually deal with empty sets as a reason to say 
that inporting {ro} is basic: it is the one we usually need. 
I don't see what importing/non-importing has to do with the "clearly 
non-importing case:" "for all worlds, if there is a world where every 
politi --- Oh, never mind, just got it.

<<
>Also, since Lojban is following
>formal logic, it is more or less forced to the importing form that that 
>logic
>uses (the apparent exception being an aberration that ran briefly form 
>about
>1858 to 1958).

Are those the dates of some particular events?
Boole's Laws of Thought to my first paper on the subject (class, not 
published). Boole gave a (not quite the first modern) expression to the 
non-importing reading of "All S is P" (but, of course, using the external 
importing "all" and something equivalent to conditionalization of the 
subject-in-the-predicate).

&:
<<
The only place where the importing/nonimportingness of ro makes
an obvious difference, as far as I can see, is as an inner quantifier,
and to my mind it is very useful that {lo'i broda}={lo'i ro broda} not 
exclude
{lo'i no broda}. If I want to exclude {lo'i no broda} I can say 
{lo'i su'o broda}.

The rest of the discussion is too abstruse and too angelic-pinhead-
terpsichorean even for me! I humbly place my faith in xorxes to
show me the light & guide me on the True Path.
I think there is a better solution to the problem of empty classes that 
allowing {ro} to include {no} (quite beside the obvious one to make {su'o} 
the implicit INNER everywhere).
The rest is pretty abstruse and largely irrelevant, since we end up about the 
same place regardless and xorxes' view is no wose -- and no better -- than 
any of the others.

xorxes:
<<
la pycyn cusku di'e

>So the point here is that uttering a sentence with {lo INNER broda} in it 
>--
>even if INNER is implicit -- commits you to there being INNER broda.

But when INNER is {ro} (which is the default) it is always the
case that there are ro broda with non-importing ro, and there is
therefore no commitment. (The outer {su'o} of course does require
there to be at least one.)
This does sound like ypou agree with me, albeit by the back door. I'll take 
that, since the use is what matters for the moment, not the theory.

<<
>We do not say that the negation of {lo broda cu brode}, {lo brode na brode}
>is going to result in {ro lo me'iro brode naku brode} when we move the
>negation through,

Of course not! That's nonsense whether the inner quantifier is
claimed or presupposed.
And this looks like unqualified -- even enthusiastic -- agreement!

<<
>but just {ro lo broda naku brode} where {lo broda} is still
>implictly {lo ro broda} (I'm not even sure just what {me'iro} might mean as
>an INNER).

{me'iro} is nonsense as inner, because the inner is always {ro},
and {me'iro} can't be {ro}.
I take this to mean that whatever number we put in as INNER, it is, in fact 
{ro} (assuming we have it right) and so {me'iro} makes no sense. Check.

<<
"Inner quantifiers" are not quantifiers. They make a claim or
a presupposition about the _cardinality_ of the underlying set,
they do not quantify over it. (In the case of non-importing {ro}
no claim is made nor presupposed about the cardinality, so the
question does not even come up.)
Well, I don't quite see how this use of PA is radically different from the 
use in OUTER, except about the identity of the set involved, but that doesn't 
matter in the present discussion, whose point was just that the passage of a 
negation boundary over a description did not change the inner quantifiers (or 
whatever) and so they have a different status from the outer one.

lioNEL:

<<
I agree, but I would have found more 'natural' for a logical language
to avoid these special cases by having no conv-implic and maybe
some explicit mechanism (special cmavos maybe) to allow it on demand.
Truth value affectations would have been much cleaner.
It is not clear that we can get away from presuppositions altogether 
(actually, it is clear that we can't), but Lojban did work at minimizing 
them, Still some remain, although they could (and probably will) be 
eliminated in a general theory of the logicalizing of Lojban sentences -- one 
of And's projects, I think.

<<
But to be consistent, this should also be true in when INNER actually set
the cardinality of the underlying subset of broda, as in{lo ci broda cu
brode},
which I would read as {ge lo'i broda cu ci mei gi lo broda cu brode},
and has such is indeed affected by negation boundaries. Or do you consider
than this cardinality is never really asserted, but belongs to {na'i}
domain,
i.e. be the same kind of presupposed implications, despite being explicitly
stated?
I would claim that it is true in the case of {lo ci broda} as well and thus 
that the expansion you propose is not correct. That is, {lo ci broda na 
brode} doesn't come out as {ro lo na'e ci broda naku brode}. That is, yes, 
INNER is part of the {na'i} domain (I thought I said that explicitly. Sigh!)

taral (quoting &)
<<
> The rest of the discussion is too abstruse and too angelic-pinhead-
> terpsichorean even for me! I humbly place my faith in xorxes to
> show me the light & guide me on the True Path.

Hear, hear.
Well, yes, but if you sign up for a language based on formal logic, you have 
to expect that a little formal logic turns up from time to time. This is a 
time. (It will go away fast into a three-way again.)