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Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 02:56:25 +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 15/10/2011 21:04:
> * Saturday, 2011-10-15 at 01:49 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>:
>
>> 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:
>>> I agree that [having kinds as possible referents of {lo}] 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 strikes me as no different from natural languages. (OK, the
>> only natlang I know at all well is English, so I will instead limit
>> myself to saying "no different 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 no less ambiguous, whether X is lionkind, or water, or Barack
>> Obama.
>
> I don't see the english as being relevantly ambiguous in any of those
> three cases. "It is not the case that lions are in my garden" means "no
> lions are in my garden" (or possibly "at most one lion is in my
> garden").

I don't know if the Lojban or the English is ambiguous (-- the English cert=
ainly seems not to be, and I don't see why Lojban should be different); my =
only point was that lo + countable is not more ambiguous than lo + mass or =
le or la.
 =20
>> Just replace "lion" in your formulas by "water" or "Barack Obama".
>
> And in my understanding of lojban, the Obama case is unambiguous (at
> least once you specify tense).
>
> Maybe you're making the point xorxes made, that we can have
> "Obama-stages" as individuals in our universe as well as having Obama
> there, and then we get similar ambiguities when talking about Obama.

Yes, that's right. That's my point. (Xorxes makes all the points I do, only=
 better, which is partly why I keep out of the discussion. The other reason=
 is that I can't keep up with the pace you two are managing -- I pop out to=
day to Occupy London and contribute to the overthrow of capitalism, and ret=
urn to find two dozen more messages in the thread, all of which require car=
eful reading. My greater participation in the thread would risk abetting th=
e maintenance of kleptocracy and the suppression of social justice!)

> This seems to me a good reason not to have Obama-stages!

Natural language (or english, at least) does, but the key point is that it'=
s a metaphysical choice. You can choose to reject Obama-stages but accept l=
ion-subtypes, but that must be your choice, not Lojban's. Lojban should be =
metaphysically neutral. Well, maybe you don't think it should be neutral, b=
ut in that case if it had to commit to one metaphysics, I'd say it should c=
ommit to there being both Obama-stages and lion-subtypes.

>> I'm not taking a view about whether they actually are ambiguous;
>> I merely assert that kinds behave no differently from any other
>> individuals. (Cf "Barack Obama has not 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 generalization over its subtypes exists for all or most sorts of
>> things, not just genericizations of countable things.
>
> Could you explain what you mean by "generalization over subtypes"?

A generalization formulated in terms of a single individual, but applying t=
o multiple individuals that the single individual stands for. E.g. "The ave=
rage man is six foot tall". I.e. what you mean by 'kind', I think.

>> And the exercising of that choice is metaphysical rather than
>> linguistic. Lojban is metaphysically neutral.
>
> But the definition of xor{lo} is such that the existence of kinds is
> required to make sense of many statements which are, in the final
> analysis, about mundanes. So the metaphysics (if that's what it is) is
> more-or-less hardwired into the language.

Are they really, in the final analysis, about mundanes? Is there anything i=
n xorlo that forces the kind--mundane distinction to be recognized? As far =
as lo goes, there is no kind--mundane distinction. For every individual X a=
nd Y there is an individual Z thatX and Y are subtypes of; for every indivi=
dual Z, there are individuals X and Y that are subtypes of Z. That's the wo=
rld according to lo (as I see it); perhaps different gadri, such as lo'e/le=
'e and loi/lei, might be grounded in different principles.
 =20
> To cross-pollinate threadstrands, an example would be
> {ro te cange cu na ponse lo xasli}
> which with kinds can mean the same thing as
> {ro te cange cu na ponse su'o xasli}
> , but can't without them. See also the discussion over there of
> {ro te cange poi ponse lo xasli cu darxi ri}, xorxes' analysis of which
> requires going via kinds to get the right statement about mundanes.

I haven't grasped the subtleties of your argument, but if it presupposes th=
e kind--mundane distinction then it's not valid (in the context of lo as I =
understand it).
 =20
>>> 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}.
>
> Do you seriously not consider such undisambiguable ambiguity a problem?

I think it's not an actual ambiguity. It's a kind of potential ambiguity, i=
n that if Z is referred to as an individual, in any further inferentially d=
erived propositions in which X is instead conceived of as a generalization =
over subtypes there may be a scope ambiguity. This is not a linguistic prob=
lem.

> I don't see that this problem comes up if we don't have kinds or stages.

Language must be tailored to accommodate metaphysicses. This discussion see=
ms to be about preferred metaphysicses, but why does it require debate? lV =
gadri are based on one particular coherent metaphysics. If there is another=
 different metaphysics that should also be accommodated, it could be associ=
ated with a different gadri series.

>
>>> (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 this long thread.
>
> I think that in English, if I say "every whale is a mammal", I'm
> either saying that every mundane whale is, or that every whale-kind
> (amongst some glorked kinds - probably: every species) is; but I can't
> be making both statements at once - not because there's some
> domain-switching going on, but just because 'whale' is here ambiguous
> between mundane whales and kinds.

Do you have evidence and arguments to support these claims? They don't seem=
 true to me.

"Not every mammal gives birth to live young" -- false for kinds, true for m=
undanes; but that doesn't mean "mammal" is ambiguous.

> In lojban, our closest equivalent is
> "ro da poi danlr,uail" - which naively would include both whales and
> whalekinds.
>
>>> 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 or 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 generalization over subtypes, and if for you a 'kind' is
>> intrinsically a generalization over subtypes, then it is better to
>> talk of domain-switching rather than kinds. I don't know how you would
>> make explicit reference to generalizations over subtypes -- maybe lo'e
>> &  le'e? -- and doubtless those would run into the sort of problems
>> with ambiguity that you have imputed to {lo}.
>
> Again, I'm not sure what you mean by 'generalizations over subtypes'.
>
> I would hope that {lo'e} could be used (perhaps (optionally?) along with
> appropriate tenses) to unambiguously give the generic meaning that kinds
> apparently sometimes have; but I don't have a good idea on how this
> would work.

Right. That's what I had in mind. This would give a way of unambiguously sh=
owing that something is a kind; but you'd still be wanting a way of unambig=
uously showing that something isn't a kind. There aren't any ready-made can=
didates for that, but afaik the lVi gadri are essentially undefined, little=
 used, and little needed, so you might argue that use for them.

>>> (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 comment 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 lo gerku is no different from liking la martin.
>
> Well, liking dogs is quite different from liking Fido,

Is it, though? How?

> and also
> different from liking almost all dogs, and from there being a high
> probability that you would (come to) like a randomly chosen dog you were
> presented with, and from anything else which reduces to talking about
> individual dogs. I do think that it would be reasonable to use {nelci}
> for this concept, but that it should be expressed by {nelci lo ka gerku}
> rather than {nelci lo gerku}.

But the same could be said for {nelci lo ka me la martin}, or {nelci lo ka =
martin} (with xorxes's cmevla-are-brivla rule).

--And.

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