Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: Meaningless talk

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 2 Mar 2001 20:18:48 EST

In a message dated 3/2/2001 3:19:08 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> ><ta'enai cipra lo fancu no'u mu'a zo mlatu i ta'ecipra
> >lo nu fancu pilno no'u mu'a lu ta mlatu li'u >
> >"sporadically test the function and habitually test the sentence"? I think
> >this is meant to be something like "give a non-traditional test to the
> >function and a traditonal one to the sentence" {naltcaci cipra} and {tcaci
> >cipra}, though I am not too clear what distinction is meant.
> 
> Why do you take it as a command? I meant that functions rarely
> get tested, it is their use that usually gets tested. Maybe you
> were influenced by Loglan where absence of explicit x1 means
> 

Sorry if it looks like I took it as a command; I didn't but just left out the 
uninteresting stuff before the verb (as in Lojban -- with varyingly awful 
results). (sorry about "the sentence" rather than "the use" there, a slip 
from the next item, which I then left out.) But {ta'e} is not about 
frequency but about intentional patterns, so this doesn't work as intended. 
{-roi} with appropriate quantifiers ("few" and "many," say) get to your point 
directly. (How could I forget about Lojban imperatives with {ko} constantly 
coming up?)

<{le remei sarcu} was the pair of requirements that xod wanted
as definition of a "meaningful sentence". What I understood
him to be saying was that these requirements are observed less
often than people think. I agree with you that it was not a
very successful Lojban rendering.>

Thanks. I don't think saying {le sarcu remei} would have helped much. And 
{zgana} is pretty clearly the wrong "observe" (I suppose he means these 
requirements are met) but where is the "often" and why is the thinker in the 
comparison place rather than the standard? In short, how did you get there 
from the actual word string presented?

<But it is also necessary to try to express things we are interested in,
otherwise the game soon becomes too boring.>

Too true, but if you don't express them intelligibly then the game gets worse 
than boring for the reader -- and you don't really learn that much.

<{cipnxirundi} is a fu'ivla, although it should have been
{cipnrxirundi} to be a regular one. I meant "swallow".
{lo cipnrxirundi pamei} = "a single swallow".>

Sorry, I took it for "the first robin," another cliche. I am inclined to 
think that fu'ivla are part of the Lojban world we don't need yet and mostly 
can't handle (ta DA!) . And why not {xirundo} ala Linnaeus (I admit I had to 
look it up)? 

<Well, I would say it's a great success that you can figure out
that much! >
Oh, the discussion wasn't *that* bad. The repetition of {gerna flalu) on one 
side and {pilno} on the other gave that away (it helps they are words I 
know). The transitions were harder and I am still not too clear on how you 
got from my philosophic pabulum, "A sentence is meaningful just in case there 
is a test to determine whether it is true" to the langue-parole part (what 
gets tested, apparently). The pabulum, exciting as it was in the 20's and 
even in the 50's (and Carnap was still working with it in 1960), never really 
had much of a chance: when it got rid of theology, it got rid of theoretical 
physics, and when physics was gotten back in, theology came along. And then, 
as xorxes noted, there was the inevitable problem of all philosophic 
absolutes, the statement that embodied it (see above) is meaningless by the 
criterion it lays down, i.e., it is untestable. (Nagarjuna rules!)

As I have noted before, anyone who doesn't like possible worlds (or possible 
languages -- they work as well) won't miss much. They give back most of 
what you put in them and nothing you don't, so the main use for them is 
figuring out what someone wants to put in -- often a rather useful piece of 
information, and one they may not give (correctly) if asked. Well, there is 
also planning experiments before you do them, to have the right size disaster 
control on hand.