Subject: Re: [lojban] Predicate logic and childhood.

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 May 2001 17:12:41 -0400

On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 04:21:22PM +0100, And Rosta wrote:
> #People seem to be implying that as soon as there is cause and effect involved,
> #you are not allowed to use logical connectives. Not that you can choose not to
> #use them in favor of a cause-and-effect statement, but that you just can't use
> #them. I have yet to see an answer to why there should not be a choice of
> #sentence structure.
> 
> I have lost the thread, I'm afraid, and can't reconstruct what are the issues
> under debate. Would you be willing to take the trouble to recapitulate?

The sentence that started all of this is "If you clean your room, I'll let you
go to the park."

I suggested {ko (do bazi) nicygau ledo kumfa .ijo mi curmi lenu do klama le
panka}.

xorxes thinks that this sentence means something different than "If you
clean your room, I'll let you go to the park" and should not be used to
translate it, instead suggesting either using the x3 of curmi (spawning a
side-debate about what the x3 of curmi really means) or some sort of
"conditional" which expresses it in terms of cause and effect. (I have no idea
how this would be formed in Lojban, and I don't believe an example has been
provided, though it might be 'rinka' with a 'nu' on both sides.)

lojbab posted a confusing message where he suggested that logical connectives
would be used for things like "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride",
but it seems that, for one thing, that wouldn't work at all, and also that
seems to be another issue which I don't think was satisfactorily resolved.

I believe that both .ijo and the conditional would give a good enough
approximation of the English meaning of the sentence. English is fuzzy enough
that we don't need to argue about how to translate the most detailed
implications of a sentence.

Incidentally, I'd like to see how this "conditional" would be constructed. I'd
rather not hunt through the archives of the list.

-- 
Rob Speer