No Subject

["Steven M. Belknap" <sbelknap@UIC.EDU>]

la djan cusku di'e

>In the same way, my comments about "fuzzifying proselytizers" or whatever
>was aimed more at some of the real pros, Kosko in particular.  However, if
>he wants it, the shoe fits smoothly on stivn's foot.

Note that socks provide an indistinct, one might almost say "fuzzy"
boundary between shoe & foot.

>He does not,
>admittedly, say that the dictionary contradicts (or even is contrary to)
>pitr's claim, he just says that he uses the dictionary to "correct"  pitr.
>A fairly fuzzy distinction, I think.  But before you protest that that is
>not fuzzy, notice that, in stivn's usage, anything is or can be fuzzy

A challenge to all: produce a gismu which can not be considered to be fuzzy.

>He
>keeps, for example, talking about various ordinal scales as fuzzy, without
>giving any evidence that they are and, indeed, even after defining the one
>for tallness (not directly related, notice, to "is tall") in metrical
>terms (between n and m centimetres high) as well as giving them common
>labels ("very tall," "rather tall," "quite tall,"  and so on).  Then, to
>back this up (or because presupposing it to be true) he takes this ordinal
>scale and starts using it as though it were a ratio scale, taking 3/4 as
>.75 rather than in the 3 category of a (?)1-4 ordinal scale.  In any case,
>nothing about ordinality (or any of the other Guttman types) is inherently
>fuzzy, though you can fuzzify any of them in some way -- differently for
>the different types, I would think.

Guilty again. There are two reasons. First, I have already been writing too
much about fuzziness, and this is the lojban list. I am more interested in
putting fuzziness into lojban than in being a fuzzy missionary. So I've
glossed over some of the nuts 'n bolts of fuzzy, loosing rigor & clarity in
the process. Second, Robert Chassel brought the Guttman scales to my
attention well into the discussion between Peter&I; after Robert's quite
illuminating notes, (thanks again, Robert!), I have been more careful about
distinguishing the fuzzy issue from the scale issue; I certainly agree that
the two issues are distinct. So my early use of the word "ordinal" was
sloppy (bad) as well as fuzzy (good).

>
>So back to the basic point. An awful lot of terms are not at all fuzzy,
>even if there are occasional hard cases about whether they apply.

Name five clearly nonfuzzy lojban gismu. You knew that was coming. :-)

>It may even be that the new term tells us interesting things about the old
>term, that a fuzzy "tall" enables us to produce an intelligent system that
>reproduces people's judgments of tallness with high accuracy and allows
>us (as formal logic does for arguments) to have good reasons for
>decisions in hard cases.

Right, which is why I argue that the definition of a word should be clearly
differentiated from the scale being used when the word is part of an
utterance. This could be done either by building a formal mechanism in
lojban for adding scale to an expression, or by making a separate
definition of each gismu for each scale. For *most* gismu, this would mean
that 2 or 3 of the scale-specific definitions would be [unspecified]. I'm
sure lojbab would have no objection to redoing the entire dictionary,
quadrupling its size in the process, so as to provide all the extra
scale-specific definitions, most of the additions being [unspecified]! :-)

>  That still does not mean that the technical term
>(and its apparatus) have hit on the real meaning of the natural term; we
>can disagree with the machine's judgment  -- even in systematic ways --
>just as we do about formal logic's judgments about some arguments.

I don't disagree, but would say this somewhat differently. Each of our
realities differs somewhat, incorporating scale and fuzziness would enrich
the language so as to allow each speaker to better express his/her reality.
My goal is not to force other people to be fuzzy or to use scales
explicitly, but rather to find (or add) the lojban constructs which allow
elegant, concise fuzzy and explicitly scaled expressions for those speakers
who would like them.

>
>Snobol programs
>for character manipulation are models of simplicity compared to, say, C
>programs to do the same thing.  But the computer does basically the same
>thing when it executes (slightly -- but insignificantly - - different
>because of different optimizations; they just do useless things in
>different places). That does not mean that the concepts embodies in Snobol
>are better or nearer the mean of text than those in C.  It is just a
>matter of convenience for a purpose (lost now, since there is no Snobol
>for anything after 286).
>
Wait a second. SNOBOL is *not* dead. There are WINTEL implementations of
SNOBOL4 written as SIL macros for C (see ftp://cs.arizona.edu/snobol4) and
there is probably something mapping SNOBOL4 to Pascal also. Linguists are
still using SNOBOL for various things. Peter-Arno Coppen, for example has
something called GRAMTSY which is some sort of transformational grammer
parser (see P.A. Coppen, "A Technolinguistic Approach to Natural Language
Parsing" in: E. Johnson (ed) Proceedings of the Sixth International
Conference on Symbolic and Logical Computing, 85-95.) I believe that
Coppen's program is implemented in SNOBOL. On the Macintosh platform there
are various flavors of SNOBOL that have been put on top of Scheme. And
that's just the free stuff. If you want to fork over some cash, Macintosh
Common Lisp has such a rich tool set, that you'll forget all about SNOBOL
or SPITBOL, but if you really wanted to (nostalgia?) you could implement
SNOBOL4 in Macintosh Common Lisp. IMHO, Wolfram Research's Mathematica
would be a better platform for language parsing than any flavor of Lisp,
but what do I know, I'm a doctor not a linguist.

But that wasn't your main point, with which I agree, but which I think
misses the point. An analogy: It is possible to express Keppler's laws in a
Ptolemaic earth-centered model of the solar system, but the Copernican
model sure is a hell of lot more elegant. Speaking as a former programmer,
a computer program is close to meaningless until it does something. If I
had to write software in C, I would write no software. Although a Lisp
program may "mean" the same as a C program, what good is that fact if the C
program never gets written because its just too hard?

>use" orientation).  I wonder what the difference is between the high sea,
>the deep sea and the wide ocean, in the English store of cliche's (or
>tropes anyhow).

In E.M. Forrester's Horatio Hornblower novels, (an early version of Star
Trek), the high sea refers to those parts of the sea within the
jurisdiction of the British courts of admiralty, that is, not within the
jurisdiction of any nation The meme is very old, the OED gives a C.E. date
of 1000 for the first occurrence of heahs=E6 in Old English. (Thus,
pre-Norman) It has the same sense as high-way does for roads: There are no
(treaty or nautical) impediments to navigation on the high sea. Of course
there might be the equivalent of highwaymen (pirates!)

Thus, sailing the high sea means you are outside the territorial waters of
any nation, far from land, and (perhaps) in some jeopardy from pirates,
storms, or unrescuable maritime disaster. As a lojban equivalent, I would
suggest <zifre> for this sense of "high." There's still the problem with
<xamsi>, which I think jorge mentioned, where the X2 position specifies
what planet the sea is on, which seems kind of weird. Also, what if you're
not on a planet? What if you're in the Neutral Zone, and a Klingon War Bird
is attacking...

<zifryxamsi> for high sea?

co'o mi'e stivn




Steven M. Belknap, M.D.
Assistant Professor of Clinical Pharmacology and Medicine
University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria

email: sbelknap@uic.edu
Voice: 309/671-3403
=46ax:   309/671-8413