Subject: Re: [lojban] RE:not only

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2001 10:09:50 EDT

In a message dated 4/17/2001 11:58:59 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> > {ji'a}, however, does not change truth values, so is not a case in point.
> 
> So you don't see a problem in something like:
> 
> pa da nenri le tanxe i le bolci ji'a cu go'i
> "Exactly one thing is in the box, the ball too is in the box."
> 
> There is nothing strange about that sentence if we remove {ji'a},
> but adding it makes it very weird. In that sense I think it affects
> truth values. And {po'o} is much like it in my mind, the
> "no additional" that it contains is just like the "in addition to"
> that {ji'a} contains. They both affect the truth value in the same
> sense, if they affect it at all.
> 
Yes, the sample sentence is strange -- but it is not false (assuming that {le 
bolci cu go'i}is not false). {ji'a} is the wrong discursive to use at this 
point; {sa'e} would be better or some other "namely rider." The "in addition" 
is the remark, not the thing mentioned in the remark: " the ball too" is 
sloppy translating for "moreover the ball."
Having said that, I recognize that the conventions that are built into the 
language are being violated all the time, that "usage is deciding" and 
changing the language even during the freeze, which turns out, as a 
consequence, to have been a someone misguided idea. Still, there is no harm 
-- and possibly some good -- in trying to learn and use the language as it 
was intended for a while before we go off and make something livable but 
sloppy out of it.

<You can't say for example: "Only the cat likes that chair,
not even the cat likes it." That's contradictory.>

I say it frequently (well, things of that form, all my cats are in the 
sandbox in the sky)
"only my wife likes olives and even she can't stand them" Even English is 
occasionally a logical language, and even if it weren't, Lojban is.  
Since Lojban has consistently refused to give existential import to 
universally quantified terms (and it has repeatedly over nearly 50 years), it 
is stuck with the situation that "only S are P" does not entail that some S 
are P or even that there are some Ss or some Ps. In most cases, you can get 
a Gricean implicature to that effect, but that is cancellable by context -- 
including factual additions.  
"Only the brave deserve the fair" = "None but the brave deserve the fair"= 
"No one that is not brave deserves the fair" and so on, each step making it 
clearer that no commitment is made to there being either a brave person or a 
person who deserves the fair.

<><Avoiding {du} is always good Lojban practice, though.>
>Why would"the logical language" want to do away with a central part of the
>language of logic?  Neither {mintu} nor {me} are as well defined.

I don't know, it is never needed in normal usage, and almost
every time when it is used, it is misused.>
Here is a "normal" usage where it precisely is needed and in its most correct 
form. How is it misused? As another "is"? 

<, but "only the cat likes that chair" does imply
that the cat likes that chair. It is not just a case of
"only Ss are Ps".>

What is it a case of, then? Surely the fact that the subject is singular 
does not alter the logic so completely -- especially if it can take the same 
quantifier expression as the general case.