Re: Numbers and math

On Fri, Sep 22, 2000 at 08:55:59AM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> Set theory isn't my strength; I'm assiduously avoiding the semester class
> in Zermelo-Fraenkel (I hope I spelled that right) set theory.
Hehe... I like set theory as a subject to admire from a distance (eg. pick
out neat interesting properties to show off to others about) but doing
rigorous proofs about set properties myself isn't exactly how I'd like to
spend my time. Especially once you get beyond the elementary stuff. My
worst nightmare is constructing bijections that are so abstract that
sometimes you have a hard time being convinced by a rigorous proof! :-)

[snip]
> What would be *really* fun to encode in a conlang in terms of
> conjunctions/conditionals (and, but, if...?  I'm never sure if I have the
> right terminology), would be fuzzy logic, a.k.a multivalent logic (and
> yes, it's an area of math, and no, it isn't *that* fuzzy).  So you could
> have ways to express (A and not-A) without being inconsistent, because
> you have the in-between shades.  I only wish I knew more about the field;
> I'm probably going to stick to more tame conjunctions/conditionals for
> Chevraqis, like XOR and OR and so on.
[snip]

If I'm gonna do logic in my conlang, it has to be at least trivalent
(since the culture is obsessed with the number 3). The hard part is, how
to build this into the syntactic/semantic structure of the language in a
way that actually makes sense...


T