Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:not only

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 00:01:25

la pycyn cusku di'e

>First semester logic students have
>bucked at "Only Ss are Ps" as "All Ps are Ss" since at least the third
>century bce (a textbook by Theophrastus assumes the student has this 
>problem)
>and fans of "the logical language" have been no more tractable.

That works for general statements, but how would you handle
things like "only the cat likes that chair"? There is no
natural way of saying "all likers of that chair are the cat"
in Lojban, you end up with {me le mlatu}, which seems to me
just about as crutchy as {po'o}. Lojban is not really streamlined
for quantifier logic. {po'o} seems to work mainly in conjunction
with {le}, I can't see an easy way of using {po'o} for the
general "only Ss are Ps". How could we say "only humans
kill for sport" using {po'o}? It doesn't work.

co'o mi'e xorxes

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