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

From: Invent Yourself <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 12:41:56 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 30 Sep 2002 [email-masked] wrote:

> 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).

So we're back to where I started: "comes and goes", and "quantity changes
over time" are two strings of characters that describe the very same
reality. They don't even focus on distinct aspects of that phenomemon
either.

> <<
> 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.

Sorry, but that English rendering seems perfectly sensible to me.

> 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.

Sure, but nobody has ever suggested that.

> The property-of-event reading is unrelated, but seems to be what the
> examples call for.

But *which* property? Which property of an event is being selected is
well-defined if there is a ce'u in the event sub-bridi (and I will not
entertain a tangent on the issues surrounding ka nu ce'u broda), but
without a ce'u, any conceivable property might be intended by the speaker.
This is, of course, why I already declared ka without ce'u ill-defined.

If you still don't get it, then take the bridi "la godziras. cu cadzu",
and use ka to extract "earthshaking" from that.

> > <<
> > 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.

Suppose there is a fellow, Jake, who is a foot taller than Kareem. It is
possible for an observer to define the boolean "tall" as true if the
person is over the height of Kareem + .5ft. Now Kareem is short and Jake
is tall. And in this way, when moving to a fuzzy system, it is truer that
<<Jake is tall>> than <Kareem is 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.

I'll let you know when I run into a problem using jei this way.

> <<
> 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?

I made an error here; each boolean state does not need to refer to a
single height.

> 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).

I don't know why we'd arbitrarily round all heights between 0ft and 1ft to
0 truth value, since we certainly have enough truth values to go around
between 0ft and 00ft (that's infinite to you). Introducing discontinuities
into a function which symbolizes a continuous one seems uncooperative
although legal.

> 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).

Perhaps monotonic or even continuous isn't enough of a claim, but some
sort of Grice/Occam's Razor assumption of keeping the truth value/reality
mapping as linear as possible; any deviation requires some sort of
justification.

-- 
Before Sept. 11 there was not the present excited talk about a strike
on Iraq. There is no evidence of any connection between Iraq and that
act of terrorism. Why would that event change the situation?
-- Howard Zinn