Re: Lojban ML: Syllogism and sophism

["Jorge J. Llambías" <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

Lionel:
>That's right. I was trying to reach the most concise and complete physical
>description of the linguistic contradiction. Something like a common-sense
>AI description mandatorily telling apart a whole thing from its components,
>and an absolute quantity change from a relative one.
>
>   cheese.whole.quant.abs.up -> cheese.holes.quant.abs.up

But that is not a logical conclusion. Only a very likely one based
on the more likely way in which the cheese.whole.quant.abs
could increase. If you increase it by filling in the holes then it is
not the case that the quantity of holes will go up.

>   cheese.holes.quant.rel.up -> cheese.matter.quant.rel.down

Same here. If you increase the quantity of holes by adding cheese
so that each hole is split into two holes, then the cheese.matter.quant.rel
goes up. So you are not being more precise than the original here.
You still have to make common sense assumptions.

>Natural languages don't provide any short expression for such precisions,
>not necessarily because they are obvious, but mostly because they are
>fuzzily understood, which makes language manipulations so easy.

I don't think Lojban goes beyond natural languages in this respect.

 >Oops, it should be {cirla cu zenba kevna}. I've made idiomatic English
>constructions in all those sentences.

That's not grammatical. If you mean to use {zenba} as the selbri, and
{cirla} and {kevna} as arguments, then you have to put articles in front
of these. Articles are mandatory in Lojban. So you may have something
like:

            le cirla cu zenba le ka xokauda kevna ce'u
            The cheese increases in how many holes it has.

Or, since arguments are always elidable, you can shorten it to:

            le cirla cu zenba le ka kevna
            The cheese increases in its holeness.


co'o mi'e xorxes