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RE: I like chocolate



Reviewing the existing thread in this name, I found that it was so tangled, snarled and bogged down that extracting a coherent set of positions from it, let alone a conclusion or some useful advice, was -- if not impossible -- way beyond me or anyone I know. 
But the question remains and deserves an answer, so this is beginning again from scratch (well, with some advice from the previous go-round about what to avoid or to build to carefully).

There are actually several questions here. 1) What does "I like chocolate" mean? 2) How do we determine whether the claim is true?  3) How would we make 'the same claim' in Lojban?  These questions are interrelated, I hope, but we can -- and in the previous go-round each participant did -- answer some without the others, and that may be the most satisfactory position we can get to as of now.

But even before we really start, we need to get rid of some underbrush that can spring up at unexpected moments.  So, it is clear that when we say "chocolate," we mean a substance with significant percentage of extracts from the seeds of Theobroma cacao and especially those extacts rich in theobromine.  Not, then, a color (irrelevant) nor a particular type of candy (relevant but to narrow -- this is largely covered by "I like chocolates").  Secondly, we have to acknowledge that, in dealing with "like," we are dealing with a word that is capable of bringing in reference to events that never occur and even (apparently) objects that never exist.  If possible, this should not affect the solution to this issue in ways that make it otherwise different from solutions about "chocolate" with different types of verbs, nor solutions about "like" with different types of objects. 

That being said, it seems most fruitful to start with question 2), what are the practical truth conditions for "I like chocolate" (or maybe "He likes chocolate" would be easier, to avoid claims of privileged private experience -- "I just notice that I do within myself").  Agreement seems most likely here at the beginning. 

Let's assume for the moment we have "like" under control (meaning that it is going to be harder).  Then for "chocolate."  Liking chocolate seems to require liking at least some bits of chocolate sometimes.  The alternative would be to find some lawlike connection between some other property I have and liking chocolate, but I don't think there are any such.  So, liking chocolate requires liking bits of choclate -- and, furthermore, bits of different sorts.  If I only like filled chocolate cases, but not solids nor bars nor dipped nor hot chocolate nor..., then, while I may like chocolate cases, I don't really like chocolate (per se, we might say).  The flip side of this is, of course, that I can like chocolate without liking a particular kind of chocolate, maybe even several particular kinds (most chocolate lovers I know reject xoxolatl -- unsweetened chocolate liqueur mixed with ground chilis and, on special occasions, blood -- the official drink of the Aztec mucky-mucks).  Similarly, given that I like some instances of chocolate, I don't have to like all of them of any one kind even.  I can continue my claim to like chocolate with many cases of not liking a particular bit or any bit on a particular occasion. If I have explanations ("if I eat it now, I won't sleep a wink."  "I just finished off a Whiman sampler at a sitting," and so on) for not liking chocolate (at least not enjoying it -- taking it an using it appropriately), I can extend the number of exceptions indefinitely without losing my claim.  But I can't get by with no cases at all, and I can't get by with only special cases (my birthday, wrapped around my favorite goody, etc.)  It seems that what is needed here is art, not science: we cannot give a prescriptive number for how many cases of liking chocolate nor of how many kinds of chocolate to like nor of what kinds of cases count toward liking chocolate tout court.  One is tempted to bring in "enough" for the first two and (as noted) "non-special" special for the last, but that is just (as now constituted) either circular or hiding a vagueness with pseudoprecision.  Best to just admit that we know it when we see it -- and especially notice cases that clearly count against -- long before "never likes any bit of any kind of chocolate."  We end up with "likes a sufficiently large number of sufficiently varied kinds of chocolate on sufficiently diverse ocassions.  And then punt, or, rather, accept intuition -- or my say-so -- and then case-build if challenged.

The situation with "like" is, alas, rather similar.  Like many words in English, "like" is systematically ambiguous between an occurrent and a dispositional sense.  In the occurrent sense ("Hey, I like this" referring to something present or presently going on), "like" refers to a directed positive emotion.  It is observable (though not necessarily what it is directed at) by facial _expression_, voice pattern, breathing pattern, and probably blood chemistry (up endorphins and seratonin, adrenaline, etc.) It is perceived internally as pleasure with an object/event.  The dispositional sense is, as always, "if one were presented with the object, one would like [occurrent] it".  In general again, lacking some other general law (which I don't think there is), this dispositional claims requires being put to the test from time to time -- actually presenting the person with the object -- and requires that he likes it at least some of the time (the number of exceptions allowed is again not set and can be extended in various ways -- especially be explanations, i.e., pointing to contravening factors: but if every case is a failure, even if there is always an explanation, the tendency is to deny the claim to like some \thing and to treat the explanations as at least sometimes bogus). 

So, I like chocolate comes down to "if I were presented with a bit chocolate, I would in a sufficient number of cases with a sufficient variety of types of chocolate and types of circumstances, like the bit of chocolate presented."

This skips over the whole question of whether it is just the chocolate itself that is liked or doing something with it (typically eating, but maybe bathing, or smelling or smooshing between your fingers, or... again, there  seems to have to be at least one of these, but which one or how many more than one seem unimportant).  These are buried for the moment in "presented" and, maybe, in "like," which has demonstrated tendencies to subject raising.  They may come out interestingly in the issue of how to say this in Lojban (Question 3).

Well, if this is what we want to say straight out, Lojban is not in too good shape to do so at the moment -- the whole issue of how to say "if I were to ..., then he would..." does not yet have a fixed format that all agree to.  And, anyhow, we don't want to put all that in just to say that I like chocolate.  But then Lojban has at least a sketch of a solution.  There are a couple of words in Lojban that might be taken as pointing to such a complex hypothetical without actually spelling it out.  These are the expressions listed as "the typical x" and "the stereotypical x," assuming that these work pretty much like the English expressions they are glossed by -- and that these work pretty much like other similar looking English expressions: "the average x," as the clearest case ( "the average x ys" = "if we were to take all the x's and add up their y scores and divide by the number of xs the result would be y," pretty much). Mutatis mutandis (and thereby hangs a long tale, surely, but one dealt with above), something like this might be made to work for liking chocolate, with the appropriate mark on {cakla} or {nu lo cakla co'e}.  The details need some working out -- how to spread these two gadri around enough to cover a half-dozen situations or more.

But befoe we get involved with that, the objection may be raised that the most we have done here is decide how to evaluate the truth of the claim; we have not figured out what it means (Question 1) -- which is needed to tell whether this evaluation technique is likely to work; indeed to figure out what the sufficients are in all those places.  The technique may be a way to tell, fulfilling the conditions a good sign (in this world anyhow) that the condition the sentence claims holds but they only incidentally, contingently connected with that meaning.  The most likely candidate for the meaning of "I like chocolate" (if that is going to be separated from its truth conditions) is that it is what on the face it seems to be: a relation, liking, between between me and chocolate.  And this chocolate is not various bits of chocolate taken spearately or together but, possibly, all the bits past present and future, or, much more likely, the archetype, Chocolate Its Own Self (my Nominalist ancestors quake at this notion and my Realist ones rejoice, while I just figure we have to allow all the possibilities to be expressed). 

And now the joker.  How do we say "Chocolate Its Own Self" in Lojban.  The answer has to be again in that strange set of gadri around {lo'e}.  Once we get on to all these strange critters, the archetypical fits right in.  It is not yet clear how we might sort these various things put, but the archetype is surely one of them and probably one of the simpler ones, since it seems to make the fewest specific demands -- unlike "typical" or "average" or "stereotypical" (which is just the "said to be" version of "typical," as the Lojban form shows).  The result is that, however we come at this first question -- actually listed as 3 -- the answer is going to be very close to the same, however the details -- and what they are taken to mean -- vary.