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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2002 15:01:32 EDT

In a message dated 10/2/2002 11:44:24 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> 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.
>>
Leave 'em be. I just said that I was not arguing about those words or what 
they represent, but about the rather different things -- a quality and a 
quantity -- to which they attach. Do stick to the subject or flames will 
start, I fear. Or are you really saying that "blueness comes and goes" 
(changing to redness and then to rtransparency and then back to blueness by 
way of greenness) is the same as "the quantity of blueness changes over time" 
(sometimes a 100%, some times down to almost 0%, often around 50%) mean the 
same thing. That they may refer to the situation in the world is granted; 
that they make the same claim about it or even a claim about the same aspect 
of it is denied (it being prima facie false and no second glance having risen 
to undermine the first).

<<
> "> 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.
Which, yours or mine. Your is committing use-mention errors all over the 
place, but it is not generally possible to determine in which places. Mine 
does not do that, but once stated -- and accepted as what you meant, it does 
not lead on to anything tha might be what the rest of your paragraph says, so 
far as I can see.

<<
> 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.
Yes, they suggested something else, though just what is a tad obscure. What 
I was suggesting was a specification of what might have been meant. It seems 
to work with the cases, but is pretty remote from the other uses of {ka} -- 
the connection being, as far as I can tell, the ambiguity of the English "the 
quality of redness/being red"

<<
> 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.
{ka} + bridi is a predicate, refers to a property. A property is, by nature, 
something had by many things (accidentally few, one, or none). So, the 
question, about, say, {ka la godzilas cadzu}, "Which property?" makes no 
particular sense, unless it means "Which one(s) have you in mind? or so. 
This is complicated by the fact that the property involved is a prperty of 
properties, namely that they truly apply to {lo nu la godzilas cadzu} (or 
maybe {le} or even {lo'e}). As for {ka ce'u broda}, although it also is a 
predicate, it seems likely that there is almost by nature, only one thing to 
which it applies, brodahood. And so we get, for it, And's reduction {lo} 
={le}={lo'e} = {tu'o} when we want to talk about that thing. But this arises 
from the nature of the interplay between {ka} and {ce'u}, not anything 
specific to {ka}. (Recall, that things like indirect questions {du'u ma 
broda} again refer to sets with many members.)

<<
If you still don't get it, then take the bridi "la godziras. cu cadzu",
and use ka to extract "earthshaking" from that.
{le ka la godzilas cadzu} -- it is the one I have in mind, since I just used 
it as an example.

<<
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>>.
Well, Kareem would not be tall, but that hardly means he is short -- the two 
turns are not complementary as there is a middle ground on both of them. 
Kareem is, however, boolean not tall. Moving over to fuzzies, we can make no 
general claim. Jake would normally be *tall1 or pretty close to it, Kareem 
would be *tall<1, but that is for "*tall," which was defined to make Kareem 
fall short of 1 on the scale. With ordinary "tall," most systems would have 
Kareem (7'2") at 1, I think (of course, these are fuzzy values, so even 1 has 
some flex space in it). 

<<
I'll let you know when I run into a problem using jei this way.
I suppose there are a number of cases in the literature, but I haven't them 
to hand and they make be too specialized to make a difference in your usage 
anyhow. Of course, your way of doing things will generally work; but it is 
not required by the systems and thus, collapsing the different systems into 
one is not a good plan (they have different value restrictions for one thing 
-- Olympic judging, the quantity of "this is a good performance," is 0.0 to 
10.0, the truth of "This is a good performance" is always [0,1] (you can 
convert, but that doesn't make them the same).

<<
. 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.
I shouldn't have supposed it referred to a height at all. What ar you saying 
here?

<<
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.
Well, thanks for the "legal." I think the usual reason for these flattenings 
is that 1) there are no significant cases involved and 2) we don't give a 
damn about differences at this level even if the arise. Note, by the way, 
that these are not discontinuities: there are neither gaps nor jumps in the 
function as so far defined ( I will assume that getting off of 0 is done in 
a suitably contiuous fashion when it happens).

<<
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.
I would take Grice as being unwilling to make those kinds of constraints (not 
that I have ssen him comment on this issue) and rather insist only that the 
relation between the two -- if at all likely to be important -- be agreed to 
all around and fit efficiently into our interests (which latter is why we 
tend to collapse truth values on "tall" for people over 7' and under 1' -- 
and I think the limits are actually closer together). If we really need to 
make distinction up there or down there, we have the truth-function modifiers 
like "very" and "scarcely" to do the work (they change the pitch of the 
correlation you want to deal with.)