WikiDiscuss

Posted by pycyn on Mon 24 of Jan, 2005 17:17 GMT posts: 2388

Interesting.
Actually trying to work within misterism --
rather than sniping at it for being
non-traditional, etc. — explains many things
that seemed just arbitrary before. For a big
example, the change in the meaning of {lo PA
broda} and hence of {PA1 lo PA2 broda} seems just
to satisfy a whim. But, if {lo broda} stands for
Broda (brodakind, Mr. Broda, whatever) then PA2
could — in the tradition only be the size of the
whole of set of broda, a meaning alreaady shown
to be pretty well useless. The useful notion is
the size of some subset of broda, whose members
.... . But that is not directly available in this
new notion, which does not consider the progeny
of Mr. Broda quantitatively. But the same result
can be achieved by going after Mr. PA-Broda, the
parent of all bunches (or whatever word you want
here) of PA broda including especially any of
current concern. Of course, we are usually
interested in a particular one and {lo PA broda}
allows for more than one such bunch, but that is
usually handled (as it has always been) by
context. Going from there, [PA1 lo PA2 broda}
will of course be PA1 bunches of PA2 broda,
quantifying over the things whose parent lo PA
broda is — just as {PA lo broda} does.

I am not sure about this, but it seems that the
way that a predicate, {brode}, say, usually
applies to {lo broda} is that Broda intersects
Brode in such a way that the corresponding sets
have members in common. The intersections are
member by member, that is each broda involved is
a brode: disjunctive distribution, for a phrase
(which looks at the brodas rather than Broda, but
I am not so deep into this that I can find
suitable words here — the point being that the
intersection need not be specified in terms of
members). Presumably, {loi broda} also refers to
Broda but now the predication is by bunches, not
individuals, disjunctive collection. When we get
down to individuals — typically by
quantification — the collective/distributive
distinction has to be made in some other way,
which we still lack (but then this problem is in
traditional Lojban as well outside of
descriptions — and in them, in the defining
phrases), so there is no loss here.

>From the point of view of Lojban ontology, the
question floats around whether Broda, as a
separate sort of thing, needs to be used. That
it does seems to arise out of the problem with
intersections or overlays or however it is put.
If Broda were simply a set or a bunch,
intersections would have pretty clearly to be
defined member by member (set intersection or
encompassing work that way) and that would screw
up the use of {lo broda} — the reference to
Broda — in "opaque contexts". It would be nice,
if we are to use Broda, to have some better idea
of its nature (axioms, say, or at least a number
of truths, even if not guaranteed sufficient to
characterize things completely). We know (I
think) that {suo broda cu brode} implies {lo
broda cu brode} and that the converse does not
quite work (those "opaque contexts" again at
least). But surely there are more things of this
sort to have laid out all in one place.

It would also be useful to work out the various
kinds of predications and which need to be marked
in what contexts (and get the marks for them, of
course). In connection with that, the exact
nature of general claims, for which {lo broda}
seems a natural expression. Actually, given {lo
broda} the problem is more to give explicit
expression to non-general forms, though this may
be handled by restricting to {lovi broda}, say or
by the modal parallel of {su'anai}. With
expressions other than {lo} and quantified
expressions (i.e., with the {le} and {la} series
and pronouns), predication must be assumed to be
either individual or, in any case,
non-disjunctive. This is probably also true for
restricted {lo}. That being said, only
individual, distributive and collective need
marking, as disjunctive can be assumed where it
might apply. And, of course, one of these could
also go unmarked, even in precise speaking, as
the default form (individual — but that is
relatively rarer? — or distributive). All of
these — and something in the general/specific
area — are needed also in the traditionalk
language.

Since Broda has to exist in every world, whether
or not there are brodas in that world (else {mi
nitcu X} fails when there are no Xs), care needs
to be taken in the predications to be sure that
they are always drawing on the right set of
instances (or whatever): We don't want {lo
pavyseljirna cu blabi} to be true in a world
where there are not unicorns, at least not for
other than definitional purposes (and that might
be better handled with some other expression).

Since Broda now appears to be formally
indistinguishable from brodaness ({lo broda}as an
individual from {le ka ce'u broda}), the
objection that xorlo involves an expansion of
the Lojban ontology no longer holds: with
suitable tickling of the interpretation of
disjunctive predication (for loci rather than
chunks) we can make do with the traditional
ontology (which is, Lord knows, already bloated
enough for a metaphysically neutral — yeah,
right! — language).

So there is no killer objection to xorlo. There
are any number of objections to the way in which
it has been presented over the years and
especially in the official proposal. But these
are excusable as partly due to the fact that some
of the terminology and distinctions have only
recently become available and partly to the
inherent difficulty in laying out the system in
the way it seems to have been conceptualized
because of the discussions which led up to it.

What is left is just that the system is a radical
departure from what seems to have been the
pattern of Loglan-Lojban for its first
half-century and that the change has been for
little practical purpose and even involves some
loss (for us logicians at least) even greater
than those that fell out in the shift from Loglan
to Lojban (the basic comparative nature of many
adjectives, for example). As noted elsewhere,
the pattern similarlities of {lo} and {le} are
broken, after having been reinserted only a few
years ago. And the zipfiness of some
descriptions has been diminished slightly. These
have been accompanied by no obvious gains and,
indeed, with the loss of the old foundation of
expressions in the cases rather than the abstract
generalities. We have gained the legitimization
of the move from {mi nitcu lo broda} to {lo broda
zo'u mi nitcu by} but this does not seem to be
much of an achievement: we already had the move
from the old form, {mi nitcu tu'a lo broda} to
{su'o da zo'u mi nitcu da} and the present
system does not allow — any more than the
previous did — the move to {da poi broda zo'u mi
nitcu da}. Nor are any of these moves available
for {le broda} or {la Brod} in the present system
any more than the old. And, of course, in the
old system we could get {tu'a lo broda zo'u mi
nitcu by} anyhow. In addition to which, the new
system leaves places where these peculiar
restrictions apply unmarked in use, tempting one
to try in opaque (well, at least still very
cloudy) places these inferences which work in
non-opaque places. I take this to be a net loss
(or it would be if people had used the correct
forms in the old days: what they use is
now correct but misleading whereas the old forms
were simply incorrect).

Let's see. What else is claimed as an advantage
for this system? It makes generalities easier to
say even in careful usage. But, of course, it
makes particularities correspondingly more
difficult to say in careful usage. And, I
suspect, we deal more with particularities than
generalities.

The metaphysics involved is, of course,
dispensable. It was never the schemes most
favorable point, being generally muddled by
trying too many different explanations at once
rather than separating out various
interpretations or, better still, laying out what
happens and leaving the nature of the things that
make them happen open (there seem to be at least
two stories and more than likely four about what
lo broda is individually but they have at most
heuristic value — and some of them damned little
of that).

In sum, while xorlo is apparently a feasible
system and one that does not depend upon some
shaky metaphysics of one sort or another, it
changes a number of things for no real reason at
all. A couple of barely visible changes in what
can be done better comes at the cost of losing a
fairly significant distrinction and doing some
minor screwing around with Zipf's law. I just
don't yet see how the game is worth the candle
here — aside, fo course, from legitimating a
major part of the available. And even that must
deviate in only very minor — and virtually
automatically correctable — ways (assuming that
the shifts here cover all the deviance).