Subject: Re: [lojban] response to And

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 14:58:11 +0000

John:
#And Rosta scripsit:
#> Is it just bears, or also other animals?
#Sure, other animals too.

Including Ocky the hexapodal purple, yellow, orange and bebelled 
stuffed octopus belonging to my son?

#> How about Claes Oldenburg
#> sculptures? Are they +furniture +stuffed?
#No context for this. Stuffed furniture is much closer to the prototype
#than Larry is to the prototype bear.

http://artnetweb.com/oldenburg/soft.html

#> 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.
#
# Well, I reject III and can live with either I or II.

OK, so I don't think it's accurate to chacterize your position as
'antiliteralist' (which is what I read Nick sas saying).

Me, I go for II, supplemented by the observation that the truth of a
statement is generally irrelevant to its communicative import.

#> 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...
#
#Ho.
#
#But really, claiming "I have no idea what some cmavo means" is just
#nonsense at the level of pragmatic meaning. We may not know *everything*
#about what certain cmavo mean, but to claim that there are some cmavo
#about which we know *nothing* (at the l. of p. m.) is nonsense.  

I would claim that for some cmavo our knowledge of their 'meaning' at the
pragmatic level is so vague that it cannot be distilled into a concrete idea
of what it means.

#Claiming we know nothing about a cmavo, however, makes perfect sense 
#if by it you mean that you have no *theory* of its "semantic" meaning.

Yes. And I think that's the relevant sense in the currnet context of dictionary
writing.

--And.