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Date: Sat, 15 Oct 2011 01:49:29 +0100
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
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Martin Bays, On 14/10/2011 23:59:
> * Friday, 2011-10-14 at 11:39 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>:
>
>> Martin Bays, On 13/10/2011 05:33:
>>> To take a simple example: when the {lo} is read generically, what does
>>> {lo remna cu prami ri} mean? There are two obvious possibilities
>>> - "humans love humans" (both generic) and "humans love themselves". The
>>> first is natural only if we admit kinds.
>>
>> The debate may have moved on, but back in the day, I'd have understood
>> it to mean "the human loves themself" (or, equivalently, "the human
>> loves the human", just as "John loves himself" and "John loves John"
>> are equivalent in logic or Lojban), i.e. a reading in which the two
>> obvious possibilities you mention are in fact nondistinct (because
>> there's only one human). It's true that, given that "the human loves
>> themself", one is unsure whether one should infer that "humans loves
>> humans" or that "humans love themselves", but that is a metaphysical
>> matter rather than a linguistic one, and hence not something for
>> Lojban or Lojbanology to address.
>
> So this seems to coincide with my understanding of xorxes' approach.
> Kinds are possible elements of our domain; whether a kind satisfies
> a predicate is often eventually determined by the predicates satisfied
> by the corresponding mundane individuals, but what that relation is
> varies from predicate to predicate, and is considered part of the
> lexicon.
>
> I agree that this is internally consistent, but I remain averse to it
> for some reasons I'll try to (re)summarise:
>
> (i) Although we can leave it to the lexicon in the first instance, the
> fact remains that in natural languages kind predication often resolves
> to existential or generic predication over corresponding mundane
> individuals.

That's debatable. In the context of the present discussion, xorlo Lojban st=
rikes me as no different from natural languages. (OK, the only natlang I kn=
ow at all well is English, so I will instead limit myself to saying "no dif=
ferent from English".)

>Presumably the same would hold for kinds in lojban. But
> once we perform this resolution to the level of mundanes, we find that
> different interpretations of {lo} resolve to different logical forms.
> For example, {na ku lo cinfo cu zvati lo mi purdi} has at least the two
> following meanings in terms of actual lions:
> 1. {lo cinfo} is interpreted as a plurality of mundane lions, giving
> roughly:
>      For L some (contextually relevant) lions: \not in(L, my garden)
> (which probably means that there exists a lion among L which is not in
> my garden)
> 2. {lo cinfo} is interpreted as the kind Lions, giving
>      \not in(Lions, my garden)
> which is then resolved existentially, giving
>      \not \exists l:lion(l). in(l, my garden) .
>
> So subtleties aside, we have a straightforward ambiguity between
>      \exists l:lion(l). \not in(l, my garden)
> and
>      \not \exists l:lion(l). in(l, my garden) .
>
> This seems toljbo to me.

But for any X, "it is not the case that X is in my garden" is no more and n=
o less ambiguous, whether X is lionkind, or water, or Barack Obama. Just re=
place "lion" in your formulas by "water" or "Barack Obama". I'm not taking =
a view about whether they actually are ambiguous; I merely assert that kind=
s behave no differently from any other individuals. (Cf "Barack Obama has n=
ot been in my garden", "Barack Obama has been not in my garden".)

The choice of whether to view something as an individual whole or as a gene=
ralization over its subtypes exists for all or most sorts of things, not ju=
st genericizations of countable things. And the exercising of that choice i=
s metaphysical rather than linguistic. Lojban is metaphysically neutral.

> Worse, we have no obvious way to disambiguate to case 1 (with its
> subtleties included).

If it's a problem, it's not a problem specific to kinds or to {lo}.

> (ii) kinds and mundanes intefere when they are both in the universe, in
> a way they don't in natural languages.

I don't see any difference between xorlo Lojban and natural languages. But =
admittedly, I may have overlooked evidence you have presented earlier in th=
is long thread.

>That's because we refer to
> individuals by their properties rather than having nouns, so if
> brodakind brodas then, according to the usual rules, {su'o broda} and
> {da poi broda} can pick up brodakind. One fix for this is to have the
> universe snap to one which excludes mundane brodas when we want to talk
> about brodakind - but that's so dramatically inconsistent with the kind
> of semantics I'd expect a logical language to have that I have trouble
> even taking it seriously, still less imagining how it would work.
> An alternative is simply to declare that these constructions *don't*
> pick up kinds; but this doesn't smell all that much less like a hack
> than the domain-switching approach, and it does block direct
> translations of natural language constructions like "there are two
> whales in this sea - the killer whale and the hump-backed whale", or
> xorxes' "humans have two legs - the right leg and the left leg".

It's no business of the language's to take a view how many whales or legs o=
r brodas there are. There might be one, or two, or zillions. So the domain-=
switching approach seems to me to be entirely correct.

On this view, the referent of {lo} is not semantically encoded as being a g=
eneralization over subtypes, and if for you a 'kind' is intrinsically a gen=
eralization over subtypes, then it is better to talk of domain-switching ra=
ther than kinds. I don't know how you would make explicit reference to gene=
ralizations over subtypes -- maybe lo'e & le'e? -- and doubtless those woul=
d run into the sort of problems with ambiguity that you have imputed to {lo=
}.

> (iii) I don't believe that it's obvious from the gimste or dictionary
> efforts what the meanings of selbri are when applied to kinds. For
> example, I think xorxes claimed that when {nelci} has a kind in x2, it's
> gives a pure-kind predication like that of the english "I like dogs",
> and never has a generic or existential meaning. Is this information
> really something you can glean from the gimste definition of {nelci}?

I must have been inattentive at that point of your discussion, so I can't c=
omment on the claim you attribute to xorxes. For my part, I'd say that the =
meaning of "nelci X" is oblivious to whether X is lo or le or la. To like l=
o gerku is no different from liking la martin.
 =20
--And.

--=20
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