Re: Logical?

And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:

>Mike S.
>> And Rosta <a-rosta@...> wrote:
>>
>> >Mike:
>>
>
>It's almost what I have in mind. I think that all sentences
>involve an illocutionary operator that encode what the sentence
>is (statement, question, command), but they have the status of
>'conventional implicature', i.e. they are linguistically encoded
>but outside the truth conditions of the sentence. It is the
>propositional content of the sentence that has truth conditions.
>
>It follows from that view either that sentences themselves are
>not true or false or that, say, "Go!" is true iff the addressee
>goes, and "Did she go?" is true iff she did go.
OK, I think I understand.

It's probably not necessary to do what I had originally
intended, i.e. give the illocutionary operators themselves
a truth condition (all of which except statements were based
on the speaker's sincerity;  this might arguably be useful
in cases when one misuses, for example, the attitudinals,
e.g. "How sad!" would be false is the speaker was not sad.



>> >> An expression is logical if it evaluates to either true or
>> >> false, but not both.  In plainer language, every expression
>> >> in a loglang should *unambiguously* convey to the listener
>> >> an idea about the way the world would have to be in order
>> >> for the expression to be true.
>> >
>> >This is too high and too inappropriate demand. For example,
>> >the truth of a sentence containing a referential expression
>> >cannot be determined until the referent is determined, but
>> >the language itself does not determine the referent; when
>> >I say "I saw him/the man score", there is nothing in the
>> >sentence -- in the linguistically encoded/determined meaning
>> >-- that tells you "him/the man" refers to David Beckham.
>> >Rather, the reference is determined pragmatically, and the
>> >sentence encodes an *incomplete/underspecified* logical
>> >formula.
>>
>> This gave me some food for thought.  There are two
>> possibilities here.
>>
>> If "him/the man" is an anaphor for David Beckham, previously
>> established in discourse, then we have a bound variable, and
>> the sentence is totally logical.  I know this is not what
>> you had in mind, but I mention it to be thorough.
>
>This is true only if your loglang grammar defines binding
>relations over the domain of the entire discourse and not
>just the current sentence. For English, prior textual
>context has the same grammatically-invisible status as
>the rest of the context. (Indeed, for English and probably
>all natlangs, referential phrases must be unbound.)
That's true.  It seems that referring to items established
in discourse in an unambiguous way presents a number of
challenges.  I was toying with the idea of anaphor as
article



>> If "him/the man" is being newly introduced into the discourse,
>> we have what *appears* to be a free variable.  However,
>> I think this only holds if one insists there is no discernable
>> existential proposition inherent in the statement.  I am
>> inclined to argue that there is.  What we have is:
>>
>> Ex [(x is a man) & (I saw x score)]
>>
>> Whether or not the speaker has a much more specific referent
>> in mind than a simple existential does not, IMO, degrade
>> the logicality of the statement as given.  The speaker might
>> simply choose not to mention that data, just as he may
>> choose not to mention what color shirt he was wearing.
>> IMO, the sentence has provided enough information to convey
>> to the listener an *idea* about the way the world would
>> have to be in order for the expression to be true, or false.
>
>But English, Lojban (le/lei) and Livagian, to cite just three
>estimable languages, allow for what are called 'specific' or
>'referential' expressions', where the encoded meaning is
>precisely that the truth conditions of the sentence cannot be
>determined until the referent has been identified. Thus I may
>go into a bookshop and say "I'm looking for a (certain) book"
>and be claiming not "Ex x is a book I'm looking for" but "I'm
>looking for War & Peace".
This matter becomes clearer to me when I compare propositions like:

(1) The man scored.
(2) The only man wearing a green bowtie scored.
(3) The first man to fly across the Atlantic scored.

What's interesting is that the subjects of propositions (2)
and (3) contain (most likely) enough information in themselves
to specify the referent, but (1) does not.  To put it another
way, if we assume for a moment that all three propositions
are true, then the sets of objects satisfying the separately
considered truth conditions of the subject and predicate,
taken within a given universe of discourse, in (2) and (3)
are most likely identical, but in (1) are most likely not--
*unless* we interpret "the" in itself to somehow specify such
a set.  I do agree with you that such is the intention of
the speaker, and thus the existential rendering I offered,
while clearly subsumed by the statement, does not name all
the intended truth conditions--though it does seem to name
all the explicit ones.

But, there are moments when for my loglang I want to render
(1) strictly as an existential claim, one which could
gradually turn into a specific claim as discourse provided
more information.  The article "the" would serve to tag an
anaphor that links an identical "working" object set that
appears as arguments of predictates in propositions given
through discourse.  In this way, all propositions would be
logically complete from the beginning.  As much as this
places a burden on the speaker to add more information
whenever he wants to make a claim stronger than mere vague
existence, the chance of misunderstanding through
misassumption is, arguably, decreased proportionately.  One
might consider experimenting with this approach, at least.

[Mischaracterization of Lojban descriptors and subsequent
correction accepted and snipped.]



>> BTW, I think that Lojban descriptors are its greatest feature;
>> they turn examples like the one you give into explicitly
>> logical propositions.
>
>They're an improvement on English, but I prefer the 134 Livagian
>determiners...
Well, that seems a few more than I had planned :-)  I take
it your determiners subsume quantifiers, deictics, etc?

One thing that I wonder about is the non-veridicality of
<le> when <la> is available as a true non-veridical.  Was
there ever any proposal to upgrade <le> to a veridical-
specifier, or at least demand that the speaker use <le>
only when he truly believes that the object fits the x1
of the construction it tags?



>[...]
>> >As for 'unambiguous pragmatics', much as I attribute it to
>> >Livagian culture, it would be a cultural rather than a
>> >strictly linguistic phenomenon, since a fully logical
>> >language may nevertheless be used illogically.
>>
>> On reflection, I might have overstated the need for unambiguous
>> pragmatics.  To use a not-so-great example, if the English
>> phrase "kick the bucket" is so commonplace for "die" that
>> it is essentially rendered a lexical entry, then of course
>> the speaker and listener will have an understanding and
>> logicality is served.  This seems perilous though.  How
>> do you express veridically when a bucket really is kicked?
>
>And more generally, if you don't say what you mean, and
>trust your addressee to infer what you mean from what
>you say, how can you ever guarantee that your addressee
>correctly understands you?
Exactly.



>So yes, to get full mileage from a logical language you do
>need a 'logical pragmatics' (a la Commander Data, Seven
>of Nine, Spock), but my point was that this logical pragmatics
>is a property not of the language but of the culture of
>the community using the language. It is beyond the reach
>of loglang design.
OK, I missed your point the first time around.  True, but
ultimately all aspects of a practical, living language will
be beyond the reach of loglang design.  The best one can do
is hope that the product of such a design will be of such a
well-executed nature, and the speakers it attracts of such
a temperament, that the speakers themselves will feel
compelled to preserve its purity.


Regards

---   Mike

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