4 ms·

I wonder if you could get the intended result for any language with a simple ruleset. You don't need a language to reduce/eliminate miscommunications, you need

I wonder if you could get the intended result for any language with a simple ruleset. You don't need a language to reduce/eliminate miscommunications, you need intent and understanding.

msla 3y ago
Yes, you could, because any natural language can be used to teach mathematics. Lojban is, like any notation, a convenience for people who understand the concepts, but the concepts can be expressed in a natural language just as precisely, albeit less concisely. In fact, as Florian Cajori stated in his book "A History of Mathematical Notations", the rise of mathematical notation was opposed by people who preferred the older, natural language style of doing mathematics, what Cajori termed the "struggle between symbolists and rhetoricians." So, yes, logic is mathematics, and humans did mathematics in natural language for a very long time before we invented the conlang of mathematical notation. Moving more of the ideas into what is, ultimately, a more expressive notation is not a fundamental shift.
jpk 3y ago
This is kinda what we call "legalese". It's a sort of formalized subset of English (or whatever language) that leans on standardized turns of phrase, it tends to set up definitions for terms that are then used throughout a document, etc. All in order to reduce misunderstanding and (hopefully) be easy to interpret in the event of a dispute. However, we have whole judicial systems that spend a non-trivial fraction of their time interpreting legal verbiage. So clearly it falls short at least some of the time, otherwise courts could be, in part, automated away. Maybe that's because it's too hard or not possible with natural languages? Or the legalese ruleset just isn't refined enough?
- sillymath 3y ago
  I think that when law is introduced the consequences are not clear so the small print is used to introduce modifications to the rules, so the problem is about adapting a rule to the everyday use of it.
- hkt 3y ago
  I suspect for clarity of communication we'd need to start with clarity of thought - the reason legalise doesn't eliminate ambiguity is because people aren't effectively omniscient, regardless of the level of their training. Add to that a shifting environment (new considerations etc) which can make previously valid documents ambiguous and you have a recipe for difficulties. tl;dr cognitive ambiguities and changing circumstances are what make this hard, not language as a medium
  - nocoiner 3y ago
    I agree and disagree. I do think that the purpose of legal documents is to take a given set of inputs and dictate a predictable output. But (1) sometimes ambiguity is deliberate (for instance, to kick the can on a business point and hope that it never actually manifests itself after the deal is signed) and (2) as you note, sometimes totally unexpected circumstances arise. Wouldn’t any constructed/logical language (is that the right term?) also be susceptible to unpredictable future developments?
adastra22 3y ago
Having a better language helps. Every language has some pain points that are responsible for more than their fair share of miscommunications. Just to use English as an example, although this is true of most natural languages, the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful. So much so that computer programmers learning object oriented programming have to be taught the difference between "is-a" vs "has-a" relationships. If you say "My coworker Taro is a samurai", what does that mean? Did he dress up as a samurai for the office costume party? Does he study older forms of Japanese martial arts? Was he descended from a noble family from the Japanese feudal era and have claim to an actual samurai title? There are controlled dialects of English, like E-Prime, which forbid the use of the copula "to be" as ungrammatical, or at least heavily restrict it. You can say your coworker "dressed as a samurai", "trains in the arts of a samurai", or "traces ancestral lineage from a samurai clan", but you can't say he "is a samurai" in E-Prime. Would this make communication more clear with fewer mistakes? I don't think this has been adequately studied enough to say for certain. But at least in certain domains like military speech and air traffic control we have examples of such enforced language simplification resulting in measurable decreases in miscommunications. I'm very curious to see if we can generalize those results to a full, general-purpose dialect or entirely new language.
- bradrn 3y ago
  > the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful I’m not sure I’d characterise these as ‘mistakes’, per se. They’re just a consequence of the fact that the copula is multifunctional — just like every other English word. In fact, you could similarly criticise almost any common word: ‘go’, ‘from’, ‘good’, ‘like’, ‘not’…
  - adastra22 3y ago
    > the copula is multifunctional Exercise: try stating this without the copula. But no, "is/are" is not multifunctional in the same way that "from" is. If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're talking about relative motion today or in the recent past from one nearby location to another. If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but also spatially oriented. If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial motion. But it still conveys the same basic meaning in all these cases, as the origin point of a motion or interval, and it is not usually the case that a single usage of the word could be confused for more than one meaning. The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It is the difference between existential quantification (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is fully captured by the meaning of X). Rigorously analyzed these are very different claims. In a strongly typed language they couldn't be substituted for each other. To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is unclear whether I am saying that person is an intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that the thing that he is doing right now is not morally justified. This may seem like splitting hairs, but that's rather the point. It's at the edge of what we are comfortable thinking about in everyday life. But how much of that is because the language that we use--English--doesn't have these distinctions built into its very foundation? If we were native speakers of a E-Prime, maybe this distinction would be obvious and trivial. And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't let politicians and con men off the hook so easily for equivocating language.

I wonder if you could get the intended result for any language with a simple ruleset. You don't need a language to reduce/eliminate miscommunications, you need intent and understanding.

msla 3y ago

Yes, you could, because any natural language can be used to teach mathematics. Lojban is, like any notation, a convenience for people who understand the concepts, but the concepts can be expressed in a natural language just as precisely, albeit less concisely. In fact, as Florian Cajori stated in his book "A History of Mathematical Notations", the rise of mathematical notation was opposed by people who preferred the older, natural language style of doing mathematics, what Cajori termed the "struggle between symbolists and rhetoricians." So, yes, logic is mathematics, and humans did mathematics in natural language for a very long time before we invented the conlang of mathematical notation. Moving more of the ideas into what is, ultimately, a more expressive notation is not a fundamental shift.

jpk 3y ago

This is kinda what we call "legalese". It's a sort of formalized subset of English (or whatever language) that leans on standardized turns of phrase, it tends to set up definitions for terms that are then used throughout a document, etc. All in order to reduce misunderstanding and (hopefully) be easy to interpret in the event of a dispute. However, we have whole judicial systems that spend a non-trivial fraction of their time interpreting legal verbiage. So clearly it falls short at least some of the time, otherwise courts could be, in part, automated away. Maybe that's because it's too hard or not possible with natural languages? Or the legalese ruleset just isn't refined enough?

sillymath 3y ago
I think that when law is introduced the consequences are not clear so the small print is used to introduce modifications to the rules, so the problem is about adapting a rule to the everyday use of it.
hkt 3y ago
I suspect for clarity of communication we'd need to start with clarity of thought - the reason legalise doesn't eliminate ambiguity is because people aren't effectively omniscient, regardless of the level of their training. Add to that a shifting environment (new considerations etc) which can make previously valid documents ambiguous and you have a recipe for difficulties. tl;dr cognitive ambiguities and changing circumstances are what make this hard, not language as a medium
- nocoiner 3y ago
  I agree and disagree. I do think that the purpose of legal documents is to take a given set of inputs and dictate a predictable output. But (1) sometimes ambiguity is deliberate (for instance, to kick the can on a business point and hope that it never actually manifests itself after the deal is signed) and (2) as you note, sometimes totally unexpected circumstances arise. Wouldn’t any constructed/logical language (is that the right term?) also be susceptible to unpredictable future developments?

adastra22 3y ago

Having a better language helps. Every language has some pain points that are responsible for more than their fair share of miscommunications. Just to use English as an example, although this is true of most natural languages, the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful. So much so that computer programmers learning object oriented programming have to be taught the difference between "is-a" vs "has-a" relationships. If you say "My coworker Taro is a samurai", what does that mean? Did he dress up as a samurai for the office costume party? Does he study older forms of Japanese martial arts? Was he descended from a noble family from the Japanese feudal era and have claim to an actual samurai title? There are controlled dialects of English, like E-Prime, which forbid the use of the copula "to be" as ungrammatical, or at least heavily restrict it. You can say your coworker "dressed as a samurai", "trains in the arts of a samurai", or "traces ancestral lineage from a samurai clan", but you can't say he "is a samurai" in E-Prime. Would this make communication more clear with fewer mistakes? I don't think this has been adequately studied enough to say for certain. But at least in certain domains like military speech and air traffic control we have examples of such enforced language simplification resulting in measurable decreases in miscommunications. I'm very curious to see if we can generalize those results to a full, general-purpose dialect or entirely new language.

bradrn 3y ago
> the overuse of the copula "is/are" is a consistent source of mistakes whether accidental or purposeful I’m not sure I’d characterise these as ‘mistakes’, per se. They’re just a consequence of the fact that the copula is multifunctional — just like every other English word. In fact, you could similarly criticise almost any common word: ‘go’, ‘from’, ‘good’, ‘like’, ‘not’…
- adastra22 3y ago
  > the copula is multifunctional Exercise: try stating this without the copula. But no, "is/are" is not multifunctional in the same way that "from" is. If I say "she came from school" it is clear that we're talking about relative motion today or in the recent past from one nearby location to another. If I say "her family came from Japan" it is clear I'm talking about ancestry and/or a long ago emigration, but also spatially oriented. If I say "the party is from 3pm to 5pm" then I am using "from" to indicate a temporal rather than a spatial motion. But it still conveys the same basic meaning in all these cases, as the origin point of a motion or interval, and it is not usually the case that a single usage of the word could be confused for more than one meaning. The IS-A vs HAS-A relationship is entirely different. It is the difference between existential quantification (some aspect of this thing resembles/has an X) and universal quantification (the entirety of this thing is fully captured by the meaning of X). Rigorously analyzed these are very different claims. In a strongly typed language they couldn't be substituted for each other. To make this concrete, if I say "he is bad" then it is unclear whether I am saying that person is an intrinsically bad man, or if I am just commenting that the thing that he is doing right now is not morally justified. This may seem like splitting hairs, but that's rather the point. It's at the edge of what we are comfortable thinking about in everyday life. But how much of that is because the language that we use--English--doesn't have these distinctions built into its very foundation? If we were native speakers of a E-Prime, maybe this distinction would be obvious and trivial. And maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't let politicians and con men off the hook so easily for equivocating language.