After all, most of us most of the time are doing things other than mathematics. If I tell my daughter "You may have a slice of cake or a biscuit" I will likely be annoyed if she takes both[1].
The fact that you would get annoyed if she takes both suggests that it would be very useful to have a word that actually means that she can't have both. I don't think that the notion of there being an inclusive or and an exclusive or is inherently hard. If there would be one word for the exclusive or and one word for the inclusive or a child would learn naturally that both notions exist. With polysemy that's not something that a child learns automatically.
Finnish even seems to have three or's. The third one is equivalence.
While we are at it iff/if and only if probably should also be expressible in a single word.
I said ambiguity, not vagueness; the two are not the same.
If you increase the amount of prepositions than it's likely that some of them will sound ambiguous when used in nonstandard usage. Preventing people from making ambigious statements isn't my goal. I think language should allow people to be specific, not that it should force people to be specific.
I don't think poets will lose the ability to be ambigious through the proposals that I'm making.
We can express this in two words (either/or) already. How do you avoid the trap of trying to optimize easy to measure things (like number of words) at the cost of harder to measure things?
I'm working on a conlang (constructed language) and would like some input from the Less Wrong community. One of the goals is to investigate the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding language affecting cognition. Does anyone here have any ideas regarding linguistic mechanisms that would encourage more rational thinking, apart from those that are present in the oft-discussed conlangs e-prime, loglan, and its offshoot lojban? Or perhaps mechanisms that are used in one of those conlangs, but might be buried too deeply for a person such as myself, who only has superficial knowledge about them, to have recognized? Any input is welcomed, from other conlangs to crazy ideas.