By what standard should it not?
If you don't want to specify a beneficiary or standard, you can just leave those blanks empty, and people often do so, allowing context to fill in the necessary information. If a listener needs more detail they can always ask for it. lojban questions happen to take the form of requests to fill in a specific blank.
I gather that back in the 1990s there was quite the argument regarding what place structure certain words "should" have. In the end, the Logical Language Group decided on the current definitions and declared that they were making no metaphysical claims, it's just that words have to be defined one way or another. Too, there are grammatical ways to add, explicitly delete, or rearrange places in any word if the author should feel the need.
I gather that back in the 1990s there was quite the argument regarding what place structure certain words "should" have. [...] n the end, the Logical Language Group decided on the current definitions and declared that they were making no metaphysical claims, it's just that words have to be defined one way or another.
The result is that the place system is extremely horrible and hard to use because every word has it's own rules about it's places.
This was going to be a reply in a discussion between ChristianKl and MattG in another thread about conlangs, but their discussion seemed to have enough significance, independent of the original topic, to deserve a thread of its own. If I'm doing this correctly (this sentence is an after-the-fact update), then you should be able to link to the original comments that inspired this thread here: http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/n0h/linguistic_mechanisms_for_less_wrong_cognition/cxb2
Is a lack of ambiguity necessary for clear thinking? Are there times when it's better to be ambiguous? This came up in the context of the extent to which a conlang should discourage ambiguity, as a means of encouraging cognitive correctness by its users. It seems to me that something is being taken for granted here, that ambiguity is necessarily an impediment to clear thinking. And I certainly agree that it can be. But if detail or specificity are the opposites of ambiguity, then surely maximal detail or specificity is undesirable when the extra information isn't relevant, so that a conlang would benefit from not requiring users to minimize ambiguity.
Moving away from the concept of conlangs, this opens up some interesting (at least to me) questions. Exactly what does "ambiguity" mean? Is there, for each speech act, an optimal level of ambiguity, and how much can be gained by achieving it? Are there reasons why a certain, minimal degree of ambiguity might be desirable beyond avoiding irrelevant information?