From arosta@uclan.ac.uk Thu Dec 05 06:58:24 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: arosta@uclan.ac.uk X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-8_2_3_0); 5 Dec 2002 14:58:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 39946 invoked from network); 5 Dec 2002 14:58:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (66.218.66.218) by m9.grp.scd.yahoo.com with QMQP; 5 Dec 2002 14:58:24 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO com1.uclan.ac.uk) (193.61.255.3) by mta3.grp.scd.yahoo.com with SMTP; 5 Dec 2002 14:58:24 -0000 Received: from gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk by com1.uclan.ac.uk with SMTP (Mailer); Thu, 5 Dec 2002 14:23:55 +0000 Received: from DI1-Message_Server by gwise-gw1.uclan.ac.uk with Novell_GroupWise; Thu, 05 Dec 2002 14:58:47 +0000 Message-Id: X-Mailer: Novell GroupWise 5.5.2 Date: Thu, 05 Dec 2002 14:58:11 +0000 To: jcowan Cc: lojban Subject: Re: [lojban] response to And Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline From: And Rosta X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=810630 X-Yahoo-Profile: andjamin 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=20 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=20 #> 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 b= e #> 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.=20=20 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 ide= a of what it means. #Claiming we know nothing about a cmavo, however, makes perfect sense=20 #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 dictio= nary writing. --And.