Subject: re: rabbity sand-laugher

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2001 19:32:52 EDT

some missent items

In a message dated 6/6/2001 1:19:04 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Ummm, pycyn, you know you're responding to yourself there, right?
> 

Actually, no -- xod's intervening comment, that this was the disruption of 
vitality, seems to have dropped out at some point.

In a message dated 6/6/2001 1:32:35 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> He stated what he believed to be your opinion.  The truth value has only
> to do whith whether the statement is true from some point of view, since
> it's an opinion statement, IIRC.  He made it clear, IMO, tho the point
> of view in question was not his own.  So the truth of the bridi depends
> on the opinion of whomever he was empathizing with.
> 

An interesting -- and, it now appears, permissible -- point of view.  Well, 
almost.  If its truth depends upon my point of view and so on, then he can't 
attack the claim, as the book says, since it is selfly true.  On the other 
hand, if the evidential function as intended (in Native American languages 
and Laadan) then he himself has asserted it and on weak evidence indeed (his 
idea of someone else's opinion).  The only way to make tyhe sentence 
pragmatically sound is to look at one interpretation for one part -- the 
statement is made and I object to it -- and another interpretation for the 
other part -- someone else made the statement so don't blame me.  This is 
equivocation at best, and stupidity at worst. Or the other way round -- I 
never am clear whether it is worse to call someone an idiot or a cheat. 
 Actually, I don't think either applies -- to xod.  The book turns out to be 
so screwed up on this issue -- which I remember as being pretty well cleared 
up several times over the past years and certainly is in the logical 
literature -- that he can't really be blamed for not getting it right.  The 
present set-up doesn't allow anyone to get it right, for each choice made is 
wrong on some place in the chapter.  As it says somewhere in there, none of 
this can be used to decide correct use.  One does not expect that low-tail 
excuse to come out in the textbook!
Discussion coming on my webpage, but I have to clean the basement, too.

In a message dated 6/6/2001 4:28:02 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> You appear to be ipmlying that people are not corrected on the list,
> that everyone but you simply lavishes praise indiscriminately.
> 
> This leads me to wonder what list you've been reading.
> 

Sorry, I did not know the study was done on this list -- which has no 
children on it, as far as I know.  I did not say anything about this list-- 
is this where xod thinks the inexpert and undeveloped teaching is done. 
 Shame on him!
Actually, this is list has been pretty good up til now -- people get praised 
probably less often than they ought and they get nit-picked too much for the 
seriousnes of their offenses.  But under the new policy that everybody 
(Lojbab, xod, Robin CA?) is advocating -- the fairly standard student 
assumption in colleges these days and one administrators tend to support -- 
everybody will always get at least a passing grade, lest they leave the club 
(oh, horror!) and probably get their little egos massaged a bit on the side, 
just in case.  Meanwhile, they will not learn the langauge nor even how to do 
a decent job of figuring out how to learn the langauge.  [This is strictly a 
strawman, of course, but having been accused of doing something (unspecified) 
bad for lojbanders and Lojban, something that all are to be warned against,I 
feel entitled to a little rhetorical exageration too]

<to pe'i zo liste cu malglico toi>
Apparently I can't disagree with you about this, since you probably really do 
think that way.  And, if your point is that that is a dumb word to use for a 
narrowcasting message service, I even think that way myself.  If you are 
objecting to the word as the Lojban word for "list", then I think otherwise 
and, should you ever assert that claim, I would dispute you on it.