Subject: RE: [lojban] response to And

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 02:00:29 -0000

John:
> And Rosta scripsit:
> 
> > Is the sentence "This teddy is a cribe" 100% true? Not if cribe
> > means 'bear' 
> 
> Well, in fact I find the sentence "This teddy is a bear" perfectly 
> reasonable and am quite ready to believe it. 

So do I, but then the same goes for "This [bust] is Shakespeare".
Insisting on evaluating statements according to their literal truth
is rather peculiar, outside of discussions about semantics.

> To me, bears are categorized as the
> brown/grizzly, the American black, the polar, the panda, and the stuffed 
> And perhaps other categories, and indeed Irene's Larry is +stuffed +polar 
> So for me "la laris. pe la .airin. cribe" is true 

Is it just bears, or also other animals? How about Claes Oldenburg
sculptures? Are they +furniture +stuffed?

> Now I grant that Larry is not a prototypical bear, and I may even say
> "Larry is not a real bear", where "real" means something like -fictional
> -stuffed 

I can't tell what position you are advocating.

I. Gismu are defined as broadly as possible (but still with 
boundaries that are in principle clear)
II. Category membership follows principles of prototype theory rather
than Aristotelian ones (so boundaries are fuzzy or outright gradient).
III. For practical purposes, statements should be evaluated in terms
not of literal meaning but of the meaning that is patently intended to be
communicated.

Each position is tenable, but they are not equivalent.

> > I have often had the experience of one person asking "what does cmavo
> > X mean", and other people racking their heads as to what, given the
> > minimal info in CLL and the mahoste, it could possibly mean. Often
> > the process takes the form "Well, we have no idea what it could mean,
> > so let's invent a meaning that seems useful and is compatible with
> > Woldy and the mahoste". These are the cases I'd prefer to leave to
> > Usage's Decision 
> 
> You suffer from this because your notion of "meaning" is disconnected from
> real meaning, i.e. pragmatic meaning. (That is to say, you suffer for your
> bad philosophy.)

I threequarters believe you hold your philosophy on this matter just
for the pleasure of its perversity. I should know, because I do it
myself sometimes. But not on this issue...

--And.