Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: ka ka (was: Context Leapers)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 30 Sep 2002 12:15:28 EDT

In a message dated 9/29/2002 8:29:37 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> If you insist that the difference in semantic level between "comes and
> goes" and "changes over time" is comparable to that between "appears blue"
> and "a mixture of gases in such-and-such a ratio", I can only assume
> you're not arguing honestly.
>>
As you well know, that is not what I am arguing, but rather that in
""Example 5.4 conveys
> that the blueness comes and goes, whereas Example 5.5 conveys that its
> quantity changes over time." Specifically, the "whereas" makes it mean
> ingless because there is no difference between the two clauses. (The high
> quality of the rest of the CLL makes the conceptual chaos of this
> notorious chapter all the more noticeable.)" 
blueness (a quality) is different [the] quantity [of blueness] (a quantity, 
duh).

<<
Take the sentence: "le gerku cu cmalu". "le gerku" is the sumti in this
relationship, which happens to fill the first tergi'u of cmalu. Now take
this sentence: "cmalu fi le gerku". "le gerku" is still the only sumti
here, but now it is in the 3rd tergi'u of cmalu.
Well, I can figure out a bit better what you mean here, but it would help if, 
once you start using the terminology correctly, you presisted to the end. 
So, for example, what "le gerku" fills is the first and then the third place 
of "cmalu." That is, contrary to what I took it to mean before, the whole is 
about words, not things at all.

<<
Now that you understand the terminology, perhaps you can go back to my
last two applications of it and make sense of my thoughts on ka.
Presumably about {ka}. OK:
"> ka + ce'u describe tergi'u, not sumti. It is well-defined, whereas your
> usage of ka without any ce'u is ill-defined, very subjective including any
> feelings anyone has about the fact that da is in broda1, and I believe it
> was trounced, a casualty in the last gang bang of ka. It's also been
> abandoned by usage as far as I see, all users now sticking to the doctrine
> that every ka has at least one ce'u, and they write it explicitly."

The structure {ka + ce'u} is about places in a predicate, not about the noun 
phrses that fill them. Nope, no clearer. At a guess you mean that where the 
{ce'u} is in the bridi after {ka} tells what place of the relational 
predicate is to be occupied by the NP in constructing with that predicate, 
but that the {ka} followed by a {ce'u} less bridi is not an obvious extension 
of that notion, since the notion gives no clue about what happens once the 
{ce'u} slot is filled. This is almost true; as the case of {du'u} shows, we 
might expect {ka} with a full bridi to represent a proposition. The 
property-of-event reading is unrelated, but seems to be what the examples 
call for. This would not be the first time in this chapter that totally 
unrelated things have been jammed together (and closely connected things 
pulled apart).
The similarity mentioned is between blueness and bluness on the one hand and 
quantity and gas percentages on the other.

<<
If by redundant you mean that ka + ce'u is redundant with du'u + ce'u, I
agree. However, I believe that the number of ways ka is used has been
decreased by one, because after the discussion, as I have noted before, ka
is no longer used without ce'u, or if it's lacking it's strongly implied
to be in the first tergi'u. And I know of no other ways it is being used
currently.
Well, some people always put the {ce'u} in -- or almost always. Others leave 
it out but assume it goes to the first *unoccupied* place. And some people 
use {du'u} with the rules you describe for {ka}.

<<
> <<
> The reality remains the same whether we describe it as 34 degrees or as
> "cold". While one may choose either wording, I hardly see why a different
> cmavo to signal the "distinction" is anything but confusing. And that's
> borne out by the observation that many people have tried to construe ni as
> a counting mechanism (somehow abstracting the number of entities
> somewhere), which I attribute to the fact that its correct interpretation
> is redundant and useless.
> >>
> What reality? 34 degrees describes a reality of a pointer on a meter of 
some
> sort. To be useful outside scientific studies, that reading has to 
correlate
> with (and, hence, be different from) other factors: sensations, observed
> behaviors of objects, etc. Both descriptions are legitimate, even if the
> reality is the same, the relevant factors are different.

I agree, but I don't see how it's relevant. The subjective experience can
be described by li'i.
Fine, but the qualities of events do not have to be subjective: 
"earth-shaking" might be an objective property of the event of Godzilla 
walking.

<<
> Oh, is it {ni} that is redundant? It is not its fault that we don't know 
how
> to use it (did anyone but you actually use it as a counting mechanism?).

If you cut me no slack, this discussion simply takes longer. I would not
have said "many people" to refer to me and me alone.
Sorry. The quote I was remembering as yours was, in fact, Robin CA's.

<<
> But surely we have quantitative comments about events other than how
> many things are involved: intensity, and the like being the most
> obvious. What is certainly right is that such a short word as {ni}
> should not have been used for it.

What you describe here (the intensity of a bridi) is covered adequately by
jei.
But {jei} is about truth value, not intensity -- and there is no necessary 
(or even obvious) connection between them.

<<
> <<
> He's tall, but everyone who calls him tall know there are things taller
> than he is. Thus, "tall" never meant "infinitely tall" and everything
> remains consistent.
> >>
> Yes, there are probably men taller than Kareem, but that doesn't mean that 
it
> is more true that they are tall.

But that is exactly how I interpret fuzzy logic, and how I use jei. And
it's quite a bit more useful than any competing interpretation or usage.

Well, the people who have been using fuzzy logic theoretically, and -- more 
importantly -- practically, for thirtymyears would disagree. Unless, of 
course, you are taking me to mean by "intensity" what they mean by "fuzzy 
truth value," leaving what they (and I) mean by "intensity" undiscussed.

<<

At a certain point you generally (as I
> said, you could, I suppose, set up an infinite scale, but it wouldn't be 
very
> useful) flatten out (and introduce variants using "very" or "scarcely" and
> the like). There are surely some correlations between actual height in
> units, quantity of being tall, and the truth of the claim that one is tall,
> but the mapping do not have to be linear in any way -- and usually aren't.

In practical terms, what is usually needed is a comparison between two
observables.
For what? Surely for the question of the height measurement, not obviously 
or necessarily for either other -- quantity or truth value.

<<
In any case, if we used a boolean to describe height, we would be
describing only two heights. If we used a three-state variable, we would
describe three heights. It is true that in these two cases, the actual
heights don't need to correlate to the values used for the logical
variables with a simple function. But when we use a real variable for the
logical value, simplicity dictates that there be a simple function between
the height and the logical value. At the very least it dictates that the
function be monotonic, and that's all I need for my original point.
This seems one long and iterated non sequitur. How do we use a boolean to 
describe heights and how does doing so describe (only -- but also even) two 
heights?
A boolean is just a member of the set {True, False} (however realized). As 
such, it presumably applies to claims or sentences. But what the sentence 
describes or how is not affected by the truth value it receives (rather the 
other way, I suppose); So, "Kareem is tall," which seems to describe exactly 
one height, Kareem's would get T or F. If we move to trivalent logics, the 
sentence could take any of three values, but it still describes on height. 
And similarly if the logic (whether probability or just infinite valued) 
takes any value within [0,1]. I suppose your point is that the thee truth 
values tend to divide the continuum up into different segments: two values 
divides height into
tall and untall (turn-around for American men somewhere around 5'8" -- the 
fact that it is not clear where the break is is what eads to fuzzy logics, 
including, as is reasonable here, fuzzy bivalent logics). Three values gives 
tall, moderate and short or some such classes (and, again, really wants fuzzy 
analogs). With an infinite number of truth values, we can divide height into 
an infinite number of classes, but nothing says that this has to be directly 
on truth values. I suppose that most non-metric height classifications are 
going to take (for American men, again) anything below 1' at least as in the 
0 class and anything over 8' as in the 1 class (and that probably goes lower 
in the second case and higher in the first). That the function between 
measured height and truth value (or qunatity, for that matter) be monotonic 
seems reasonable, but that only requires that a greater height not have a 
lower value, and that is pretty surely going to be the case for all these 
system (well, I'm not sure about quantity, come to think on it). Admittedly, 
one of the more famous -- and difficult -- truth assignment systems on [0,1], 
the percentage of people who unhesitatingly (we can fuzzy this by taking 
hesitation into account) assent to the claim, might very well be 
non-monotonic, since it violates every other intuition at some place. But 
notice that, in any case, being monotonic doea not mean that 1 correlates to 
only infinite height. Indeed, the bivalent system is monotonic, I suppose 
(though I do think that factors other than height sometimes enter into the 
judgment of tallness -- skinny people are tall shorter than fat people, for 
example).