Subject: Re: importing ro

From: Nick Nicholas <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 2002 14:25:24 +1100

Wait a minute, I'm now even more lost than usual.

Lots of logic and semantics textbooks (including my own, as I check) 
have {ro} non-importing.

It has been asserted that non-importing {ro} is the current logic 
mainstream.

John and pc want it importing.

Jorge offers a solomontean solution, but would basically prefer it 
non-importing?

I agree with msg 17041. In particular, I repudiate, now and forever, 
any notion of continuity between Loglan and Lojban, and what Lojban is 
shall only be what we Lojbanists decide, not what the Loglanists 
thought.

I don't have a "Jorge is Usually Right" dictum, but a "John is Usually 
Right dictum." But I can and do disagree with him, on vo'a, and now on 
this.

Jordan is correct in his latest, that John's 0/0 argument is bogus.

Moreover, I have no earthly idea why 99ce'i being importing should 
imply that ro is importing. ro is not 100%, and ro is not *just* a 
fractional quantifier. ro is the universal quantifier. (Whether or not 
99ce'i means 99ce'i lo su'o is an argument for another day.) Just 
becaue canonical fractional quantifiers may or may not be importing, 
does not mean {ro} need be.

As a meta point, this is like what I said in the {coi xirma doi xirma} 
Wiki page. When we have a choice in Lojban, we can choose what is more 
elegant and conforming to other parts of the grammar, or what is more 
useful. I don't think making {ro} behave just like {99ce'i} is more 
useful, and I now make usefulness my criterion. (This may be yet 
another fliparound towards naturalism.)

And, if you agree with everything Jordan said in 17040 (where he 
adamantly supports non-importing), then how is that consistent with you 
going Solomontean? I'm utterly confused about what the arguments are.

xod on 17044 is right, and the logic references I've seen say pretty 
much the same. In 17059, John is misconstruing him: "66% of unicorns 
are male" is also valid. The Existential Fallacy view is that anything 
you say about non-existents is trivially true --- and falsity needs 
counterexamples to exist. That's my response to 17066, too.

Inasmuch as I understand what's currently going on, I vote Jordan.

--
It appears to be a real script (or a board game), and there are
people who want to be able to work with the script as part of the
decipherment process. On the other hand, there *is* just the one
document (or board game), so there's only so much one can do.
(John Jenkins on the Phaistos Disk; Unicode mailing list)
Dr Nick Nicholas. [email-masked] http://www.opoudjis.net