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Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 01:05:03 -0400
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
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* Sunday, 2011-10-16 at 02:56 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:

> 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:
> >>> 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").
>=20
> I don't know if the Lojban or the English is ambiguous (-- the English
> certainly seems not to be, and I don't see why Lojban should be
> different

So you're really not willing to consider the effective ambiguity when we
flatten everything to the level of actual lions, as derived above, to
count as an ambiguity? Or even as a problem? I really do find this very
strange.

> ); my only point was that lo + countable

(what does countability have to do with anything? Would anything change
if we were dealing with an uncountable set, say with {lo namcu}?)

> 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.
>=20
> 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 today to Occupy London and contribute to the
> overthrow of capitalism, and return to find two dozen more messages in
> the thread, all of which require careful reading. My greater
> participation in the thread would risk abetting the maintenance of
> kleptocracy and the suppression of social justice!

That is, of course, the secret plan.

(But yes, I know what you mean... I'm fairly sure I meant to do other
things today)

> )
>=20
> > This seems to me a good reason not to have Obama-stages!
>=20
> Natural language (or english, at least) does

Does it really? My impression from xorxes' explanation of them (and I've
never come across the concept outside of this mailing list) is that
they're an alternative way of handling tenses, eventually mostly
equivalent to the straightforward "possible worlds" approach (where
there's one obama, but many of his properties (including his existence)
vary from world to world). I don't see how english could force you to
use stages.

> , but the key point is that it's a metaphysical choice. You can choose
> to reject Obama-stages but accept lion-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,

Probably not. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by metaphysics here,
but I'm taking it to refer to the question of what we put in the domain
of our universe when doing model-theoretic formal semantics. I think
that the nature of lojban does impose some restrictions there - for
example, (roughly) there should be for each expressible unary predicate
precisely one object satisfying the corresponding ka. Lojban requires
this.

Ignoring domain-switching technicalities, xorxes would want it to also
contain, for each (appropriate?) unary predicate, another entity,
a kind, which satisfies the predicate itself.

In both cases, it's the language which is imposing this "metaphysical"
requirement. You can try to interpret expressions in the language
without following the requirement, but you're going to get bizarre
results which weren't those intended by the designers.

> but in that case if it had to commit to one metaphysics, I'd say it
> should commit to there being both Obama-stages and lion-subtypes.
>=20
> >> 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"?
>=20
> A generalization formulated in terms of a single individual, but
> applying to multiple individuals that the single individual stands
> for. E.g. "The average man is six foot tall". I.e. what you mean by
> 'kind', I think.
>=20
> >> 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.
>=20
> Are they really, in the final analysis, about mundanes? Is there
> anything in 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 and Y there is an individual Z thatX and Y are
> subtypes of; for every individual Z, there are individuals X and
> Y that are subtypes of Z.

Where an Obama-stage is a proper subtype of Obama? What's a proper
subtype of an Obama-stage?

Or do you not have discrete levels at all? Just the whole sort of
general mish-mash?

If you do have discrete levels, replace "final analysis" with "analysis
at a particular level".

If you don't... then I'm amazed that we can have a conversation in any
language!

> That's the world 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.
>=20
> I haven't grasped the subtleties of your argument, but if it
> presupposes the 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?
>=20
> I think it's not an actual ambiguity. It's a kind of potential
> ambiguity, in that if Z is referred to as an individual, in any
> further inferentially derived propositions in which X is instead
> conceived of as a generalization over subtypes there may be a scope
> ambiguity.

Yes, something like that. An ambiguity which it takes a few steps to get
to.

> This is not a linguistic problem.

It's a problem which could be fixed by changing the language. In that
sense at least, it is a linguistic problem.

> > I don't see that this problem comes up if we don't have kinds or stages.
>=20
> Language must be tailored to accommodate metaphysicses. This
> discussion seems 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 associated with a different gadri
> series.
>=20
> >
> >>> (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.
>=20
> Do you have evidence and arguments to support these claims? They don't
> seem true to me.

Nope, I was hoping they were self-evident.

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

So you'd say the statement is simply false, with the kind 'porcupines'
as a witness?

> >> 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.
>=20
> Right. That's what I had in mind. This would give a way of
> unambiguously showing that something is a kind;

Oh no, I didn't mean that {lo'e} should give a kind - at least not as
I understand kinds. It shouldn't be possible for {lo'e cinfo cu zvati}
to resolve as just {su'o cinfo cu zvati}. I meant that {lo'e} should
give something (I'm not sure exactly what) involving generic
quantification over individuals, being one of the ways kind predication
can resolve.

> but you'd still be wanting a way of unambiguously showing that
> something isn't a kind. There aren't any ready-made candidates for
> that, but afaik the lVi gadri are essentially undefined, little used,
> and little needed, so you might argue that use for them.

That's actually not a bad idea. So {loi cinfo} would be some plurality
of actual lions, working like xor{lo} but not allowed to get a kind.
Given the plural reference, this isn't even all that far from the
historical meaning of lVi.

So then I'd understand {lo} as being simply ambiguous between {loi},
{lo'e} and {loi ka}; xorxes would complain that that's almost but not
quite accurate, because sometimes the {loi ka} version blocks the
others; meanwhile, I would be amazed by his ability to dynamically
switch kinds in and out of his domains to make quantified statements
make sense - but from a distance, happy in my constantish kindless
universe.

Sounds good.

> >>> (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, i=
t'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,
>=20
> Is it, though? How?

I only meant that neither implies the other. I agree that there's
a single verb, not two with an ambiguous word 'like'.

> > 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}.
>=20
> 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).

Yes, I'd agree that that doesn't have the same meaning as {nelci la
martin}. Probably the ka version is less likely to vary with time.
Maybe it's even possible to nelci lo ka ka me la martin, though
I wouldn't like to try it myself.

Martin

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