Re: veridicality

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@GNU.AI.MIT.EDU>]

ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk cuska di'e

    I certainly support Colin & Jorge's view: veridicality is a rather
    unnecessary and uninteresting distinction, while specificity/
    nonspecificity is absolutely indispensable.

Veridicality has been central to Loglan since the beginning.  To drop
it would be to create a very different language.  Since natural
languages do without veridicality, it is interesting to make it a part
of this constructed language.

Surely you are correct that for most people "veridicality is a
rather...  uninteresting distinction".  But some of us find it very
interesting and important, and would like to see what happens if the
distinction gets built into the wiring of the grammar people think in.

jorge@phyast.pitt.edu cuska di'e

    ...he saw "at least one brown dog". In no way did he tell us which
    dog he saw. If we were in a room, and there was a brown dog with
    us, we still wouldn't know whether he was talking about that brown
    dog or not.  (Unless {lo} is specific, in which case it would
    almost surely be that dog, but that would mean practically the
    same as {mi pu viska le bunre gerku}.)

You are right, the grammar does not tell us which dog he saw.  That is
not the primary concern.  The basis of the conversation is different.
The question for the Lojban listener is whether the utterance is true.
It is true if the brown dog is a real dog.

It is a question of context specific pragmatics whether it is
important to the dialog that the dog he saw is the dog in the room,
and if so, whether it is in the room.  That is not part of the Lojban
grammar.

The question for the English listener is different.  `He saw the brown
dog.'  The question is whether he saw something that could be taken
for the specified brown dog in the context-specified region of time
and space that is relevant to the conversation, which is determined
pragmatically (and which is likely to be the room).  However, whether
he saw a real dog is *not* specified by the grammar of English, but
may be part of the pragmatics.  The reality of the dog is not basic to
the English conversation.

The English grammar lets me say `I saw the brown dog' and
mean the stuffed toy, and you don't know that, unless I spell it out.

The Lojban grammar enables me to say {.i mi pu viska lo bunre gerku}
and you know I mean a real dog, not a stuffed toy, except in
non-standard epistemological situations.


jorge@phyast.pitt.edu cuska di'e

    I think I would translate it as

            ko crane sisku ro la'o xy /=/ xy
            Search-forward for every "/=/".

    If you use {loi}, it would search for some portion of the mass of "/=/"
    and then give up, but I suspect that you want it to search for each and
    every one.

I *do* want to search "for some portion of the mass of "/=/" and then
give up".  Later, the expression searches again for another portion.
It is part of a slow loop.  You are suggesting a style that could
result in a program that might run considerably faster than this one,
but that would also take more computational resources and take much
longer for me to write.  Since this is a `do once' program, I was more
concerned with the time to write it than its slow execution.

    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    25 Rattlesnake Mountain Road     bob@grackle.stockbridge.ma.us
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (413) 298-4725