User:John Clifford

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John Clifford, aka John Parks-Clifford, aka pc, aka la pycyn., is the former Vice-President of the LLG, used to be the chief logician of TLI, and is our professional expert on logic. He occasionally writes records to the list giving the final decision on hitherto unsettled points.

.i la'ogy. pc gy. cu lojbo cecmu tcaci cmene la'ogy. John Clifford gy.; noi pu se cmene zoigy. John Parks-Clifford .i bau la lojban la'ogy. pc gy. cu ji'a se cmene zo pycyn. noi lojbo dunli zoigy. pc gy.

  • IMAO, his records are more confusing than the original threads. --John Cowan
    • I completely agree. But the reason he's so hard to understand is that he's not nearly as condescending as he should be; indeed he scores a zero on the condescendingness scale, IMO. If he didn't blithely assume that everybody had the wit to understand him, one would understand ten times more of what he says. -- And Rosta
  • His "records" also have the condescending tone of someone describing the antics of children. --Jay (I took out the other tidbit I had here, because I decided in retrospect, it was excessive. I'm sticking to the first part, though.)
    • Gee, I'm sorry I missed the rest; this was fascinating. Sorry about the "like" chikdren" part, but, being 30 some years older than most of you and most of that time spent in Loglan/Lojban, you do seem that way to me sometimes -- especially when I see an argument going round for the dozenth time. By the bye, shouldn't someone put up some of those Records for comparison purposes? pc >|8}
      • If you're going to make this kind of personal (and arguably ad hominem) remark, please sign it. --- nitcion done.

Thoughts

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/6533, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/7477, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/7513, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/7940, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/7945, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/8000, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/8077, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/8156, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9485, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9502, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9516, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/9523, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/10696, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lojban/message/10697

Question for pc

  • How do termsets and naku interact? I intend to work it out myself, but I thought you might already know. mi'e jezrax
    • Sorry, I haven't thought about that -- let me know what you come up with.

Biography

Taught at University of Missouri - St. Louis, 1967 - 2000: Logic (from Informal through Goedel Theory and Non-Standard), Philosophy of Religion (courses so called, also Medieval, Feminist Theology, Mysticism, Occult, and especially Asian)

MA in Linguistics (field work on an Indian reservation in India), PhD in Philosophy (tense in language and logic -- scrapped Indian logic when the Sanscritist who knew some logic left) both at UCLA. Machine Translation project at RAND Corp, 1960-2 (and yes, I wrote Fortan 1 programs then)

Tense and Tense Logic, Dialogic-- the new game of logic, The Putting of the Proof."Tense Logic and the Logic of Change," "Past and Perfect," "Literal Relevance," "Ends-Means Arguments"

TLI: Editor of The Loglanist (la loglentan) 1976-84, Board Member 1980-4, VP 1980-2, President (but JCB was Chairman of the Board) 1982-4

Cook, crocheter and braider, tec reader, student of religion (prepping for comps?)


John E. Clifford (Parks-Clifford — whence his sobriquets in Loglan and Lojban, pc and pycyn — for the duration of one wife) received a BA from Michigan State, then spent a year at Princeton before settling in at UCLA for a decade. In that time he acquired an MA in Linguistics and a PhD in Philosophy (dissertation on natural language tense and tense logic). He spent 33 years in the Philosophy Department of the University of Missouri – St. Louis, teaching Logic (from Critical Thinking through Goedel), Asian Philosophy, and Philosphy of Religion , and occasionally other things that needed teaching. He was an Esperantist from his second year at Exeter, though mainly lapsed. He first worked with Loglan in 1960 (after the Scientific American article) as a contribution to the machine translation program at RAND. When Loglan reemerged in 1975, he reupped, becoming the first editor of The Loglanist, a member of the board of The Loglan Institute and eventually Vice-President, then President. He joined the Logical Language Group in the mid-80s and has participated actively in the development of Lojban, mainly advocating more logic in keeping with his early exposure — under Carnap and the like — to the notion of a logically perfect language. He was involved with aUI while sabbaticating on Iowa and has recently taken up toki pona and a good old Logical Positivist examination of NSM. He is still looking for an empirically testable hypothesis that comes close to the informal proposals of Sapir and Whorf.