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From: "John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
Date: Fri, 14 Oct 2011 21:04:20 -0400
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Another ahah moment.  This talk of donkey sentences (which I have to say I =
never quite saw the problem with, since the cases where "a" was universal a=
lways seemed to me to fall into a small set of types -- but I never pursued=
 that much), called to mind Hans Kamp's discourse analysis and the floating=
 referents and that dodge around quantifiers, which seems a bit like your s=
hort domain particulars.  They simply arise and then are left behind or are=
 identified with something already in the pot.  The trouble comes when we s=
hift back into FOL and something has to be done with them -- that is we hav=
e the problem of reconciling the speaker's representation with the hearer's=
 through the medium of the language used.  While the speaker has no problem=
 rolling all these objects -- old ones, deictic ones, indifferent ones and =
particularized variables -- into gaps, the hearer does not sort them out ag=
ain with e same ease.
As for kinds, I still don't see a reason to change my view that kinds are j=
ust maximal bunches and that the various descents to individuals are dealt =
with by various ways predicates may be predicated of such bunches.  In the =
raw {no ku lo cinfo cu zvati le mi purdi}, it seems clear that "in" is pred=
icated of a bunch of lions conjunctively or disjunctively, though collectiv=
ely would make sense in special cases. So you end up with either "Some of t=
he lions aren't in my garden" or "None of the lions are in my garden".  The=
re is, of course, all the changes that could then be rung using generality =
of various sorts, but that isn't the problem here, is it?
Something similar happens with {lo remna cu prami ri}, where subject and ob=
ject refer to the same bunch, but the ivities of the two references can var=
y all over the place.

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 14, 2011, at 18:59, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * Friday, 2011-10-14 at 11:39 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:
>=20
>> 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.
>>=20
>> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> I agree that this is internally consistent, but I remain averse to it
> for some reasons I'll try to (re)summarise:
>=20
> (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. 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:=20
>    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) .
>=20
> 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) .
>=20
> This seems toljbo to me.
>=20
> Worse, we have no obvious way to disambiguate to case 1 (with its
> subtleties included).
>=20
> (ii) kinds and mundanes intefere when they are both in the universe, in
> a way they don't in natural languages. 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".
>=20
> (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}?
>=20
>>> (For nastier a example, consider the apparently classic {ro te cange po=
i
>>> ponse lo xasli cu darxi ri}... although I'd be happy simply considering
>>> this to be meaningless)
>>=20
>> Do you mean the Lojban is meaningless, because of the inadequacy of
>> the rules for identifying and interpreting the antecedent of {ri} (in
>> which case I'm sure you're right)?
>=20
> I did mean that.
>=20
> (Although I realised that there is probably a mistake in the lojban
> there - isn't what I wrote equivalent to {ro da poi te cange poi ponse
> lo xaslu cu darxi da}? Anyway, replace with {goi ko'a} as required)
>=20
>> The proposition intended by donkey sentences is easy to grasp, and
>> pretty commonplace, but hard to formulate in ordinary logic; a logical
>> language should find a way to render the proposition into logic and
>> express it succinctly.
>=20
> Yes.
>=20
> Martin

--=20
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