Subject: Re: [lojban] Not talking about imaginary worlds

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 2 Jul 2001 12:18:56 EDT

In a message dated 7/2/2001 4:25:58 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Which reminds me--What's the Lojban for fiddle-dee-dee? Do we have an 
> attitudinal for it?
> 

Which "fiddle-dee-dee?" There is the nonsense string for meter or rhyme ("... 
... the fly has married the bumble-bee"), which is hard in Lojban, since so 
few syllables are nonsense. Or the dismissive one ("..., Tomorrow is another 
day!"), which is a {cu'i} of some sort, I think, but not clear what to attach 
it too -- maybe {ui} itself. Or the one that *says* "nonsense," maybe 
{ianai}.

<And if your grandmother had had wheels, she would have been a trolley-car.>
Not quite the same case both because it is facetious (and Lord knows what to 
do with that) and because it is not the contrary-to-fact use of the real 
world.

<We can carry on such discussions either with a good deal of hand-waving, or 
by proposing a modal logical theory in which to carry on our discourse. 
We're not too keen on hand-waving here, and we certainly don't agree on a 
Lojbanic theory of modal logic sentence modifiers. This results in the 
typical infinite regress so familiar from the Tortoise and Achilles, where 
one of us says, "It's obvious!" and the other says, "No it isn't, it's 
impossible, and even if it were possible, I still wouldn't believe it.">

Which is why I am suggesting turning to a "uses of language" approach, rather 
than trying to work this out in terms of other worlds, taking (almost) all 
language as descriptive.
<The usual case is that we wish to suspend the operation of reductio ad 
absurdum (and excluded middle along with it) and use a somewhat limited 
form of positive, even constructive logic. "Let us suppose X" says the 
mathematician, physicist, or science fiction writer, "then ignoring the 
obvious contradictions, what happens?">

Classically one or the other version of relevance logic or some sort of 
paraconsistency, but I repeat that that is missing a useful alternative in 
favor of a nearly useless formalism in descriptive language.

<Hard sciences, even math, use 
counterfactuals all the time, in circumstances where the outcome cannot be 
predicted with certainty. This is the stage of generation of productive 
hypotheses that make predictions. Later on, the predictions must be 
checked, if possible, by means of proof or experimentation. However, there 
can be a gap of decades, or in extreme cases centuries, between the 
formulation of a hypothesis, the working out of a prediction, and the 
verification or falsification of the prediction. Think of Fermat's Last 
Theorem, ( or the more interesting Riemann hypothesis, for the heavy-duty 
mathematicians here) or the atomic theory, proposed in Greek times and 
verified by Einstein's theory of Brownian motion and by X-ray diffraction 
in the early 20th century.>
Pretty much my point (suppressing the bit about how long it sometimes takes 
to get it worked out). In the hard sciences, speculation leads to 
experimentation and thence to a decision on the hypothesis (eventually, to be 
sure). Other kinds of speculation are less controlled and lead less surely 
to tests and then to tests that are themselves less definitive. What can we 
work out about the situation where my grandmother had wheels? [I would ahve 
thought the atomic theory -- at least so far as it was formulated by the 
ancients -- was established by the early 19th century]

<Descartes remarked how astonishing it always was when people explained his 
writings to him in terms which he never would have thought of.>
Well, authors often misunderstand themselves, but-- more to the point -- 
interpretations (and thus ordinary speculations, too) are not so intimately 
tied to facts that we can easily discover them to have gone astray. This is 
part of the reason for not liking the descriptive language imp[lied by 
"possible worlds" and perferring to talk about language use, thus removing 
the question of truth from some of these kinds of speculations.

<Building non-standard arithemetic and analysis requires that we work in two 
different logics simultaneously. Technically they are called first-order 
and second-order logic. We don't have a good way of describing this 
situation either in natural languages or in Lojban. If we did, I think it 
would go a long way toward clarifying the grammar puzzles that are 
exercising us today.>

Well, Robinson's non-standard artihmetic does not involve second-order logic 
explicitly (or, any more than ordinary arithmetic does). It is more a matter 
of object language and metalanguage: The formulae look normal but what they 
mean is something else (Goedel's proof shows this more clearly, since we get 
interesting metalanguage readings of apparently uninteresting object language 
formulae. Well, you get that in Robinson, too, but the metalnaguage readings 
are a lot less clear).
I don't think this has a lot to do with the present problem, though.

<We will have to do what the mathematicians do--Work out how to express 
ourselves clumsily in the current language, and then invent a better one 
when we have a better idea of what we are doing.>
Amen.