RE: [jboske] RE: What is a lojbanmass? Quantification

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Nick:
> In the dim dark past of Thursday last, And said:
> 
> >> Is the consensus then that "fractional quantifiers" are true
> >> quantifiers? "piro" means "each bit of", and not "the largest
> >> possible bit of" (="the whole")? 
> 
> >I don't know if that's the consensus, but Lojbab persuaded me into
> >this view (!!!). 
> 
> And, Bob arguing something in logic should be prima facie reason enough to 
> dispute it. :-) (Actually, :-| .)

He said he couldn't see the difference and asked me what it was. 
If I had seen a difference and explained it to him he would not
have listened, of course, but, unable to rid myself of the mad
notion that sane discussion between him and me is possible, I did
try to answer him and in fact it turned out that I decided I couldn't 
see a difference either. Because Bob challenges absolutely everything 
I says, occasionally his indiscriminate challenges chance upon a 
genuinely ill-founded notion. If you shoot off enough bullets, you're 
bound to hit something eventually. So when I say "Bob persuaded me" 
I mean "Bob('s argumentative blunderbus) caused me to come to think" 
rather than "Bob's argumentational cogency caused me to come to think".

> >There are two reasons. The first is that if
> >fractional quantifiers weren't true quantifiers then they would
> >have to be abolished; that is, given the grammatical environments
> >they occur in, they must be true quantifiers. 
> 
> ..... *or*, they aren't real quantifiers, and they are doing 
> something else, as a 
> notational convenience. I mean, piro isn't a number; why expect it to 
> be a true 
> quantifier like a number?

Why isn't piro a number? It looks like one to me. Can pimu be a 
quantifier? 

Sure, piro or even numbers in general can be given an idiomatic
meaning -- by which I mean a meaning that overrides the meaning
it would have if it were compositional. But that would be a truly
egregious kludge. Better to see if you can find a story that makes
it compositional yet CLL-compatible, and, if you fail, to say that 
this is a case where CLL must be ignored, because it contravenes 
basic design principles.

> >The second reason
> >is that it's difficult to see the difference between "each bit
> >of" and "the whole" (and likewise for other fractions), unless,
> >say, the "an x-sized bit of" has extra properties such as integrity
> >of form, and if so then this is something that should be expressed
> >by a selbri 
> 
> It's exceedingly easy to see the difference for sets/collectives of atoms, 
> though. And people want to be able to say "the whole of" rather more often 
> than they want to say "every possible bit of", and "half of" more 
> often than "this 
> half of", or "that half of". How would you suggest they say it?

If "the whole of X" doesn't mean "every bit of X", then I don't see
how it is different from "X". Though, that does not necessarily
show that "the whole of" is not compositional; it merely shows that
it should be possible to speak just of "X" and not "the whole of
X". I won't here discuss what the compositional meaning of "piro"
might be, such that "piro X" = "X", since that will come up in
other messages.

As for "half of" as opposed to "this half of", that seems to be
merely a difference of specificity -- an o-gadri/e-gadri
distinction. 

Clearly the idea behind CLL piPA is that you quantify fractionally
over members and bits and then reconstitute the bits into Substance
and the members into Collective. And if CLL made that {loi piPA loi},
it would be easier to find it compositional.

--And.