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Date: Sun, 16 Oct 2011 19:52:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
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On countables.  Remember that Lojban has no mass gismu, all are count.  Whether 
we can eventually get a mass noun as a derived form is terribly not clear 
(largely because it is unclear what the various words that look to be about 
masses really mean).

Segments are more obscure than types -- and conversely; let's stick to things 
until someone can demonstrate an actual need for something else.  I haven't seen 
it yet.


----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, October 16, 2011 7:32:49 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

Martin Bays, On 16/10/2011 06:05:
> * 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").
>>
>> 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.

Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that English seems to allow only reading (2), and 
that the same might go for Lojban.

>> ); my only point was that lo + countable is not more ambiguous than lo + mass 
>>or le or la.
>
> (what does countability have to do with anything? Would anything change
> if we were dealing with an uncountable set, say with {lo namcu}?)

Countables have intrinsic boundaries, and that makes it relatively easy and 
natural to distinguish one mundane countable from another (of the same type). 
With uncountables, such as chlorine, it's relatively easy and natural to not 
distinguish one mundane from another, and hence the kind--mundane distinction 
too seems absent too.

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

I meant 'stages' not in the strict semantic sense but rather the looser sense 
that I'd understood it to have in this discussion, namely "subtype of a type 
that has intrinsic boundaries". "Obama" is a type that has intrinsic boundaries, 
but English allows us to speak of subtypes of Obama too, as in "the young Obama" 
or "(the) two Obamas" or "an unusually exuberant Obama".

The main difference between 'Obama' and 'lion' -- as far as accounting for their 
differing grammatical behaviour goes -- is that Obama is naturally seen as being 
a singleton at any one point in time. But where that difference diminishes, as 
with 'Father Christmas' or 'Elvis' or 'Mickey Mouse', so too does the difference 
in grammatical behaviour, so that it is quite usual to speak of "two Father 
christmases, two Elvises, two Mickey Mouses, a Father Christmas, a Mickey 
Mouse".

>> , 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.

That's right.

> 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.

I was intending to make two points, but not distinguishing them clearly. The 
first is that the metaphysics entailed by the semantics of lV is an especially 
permissive one, making the fewest possible distinctions and prejudgements. If a 
language aspired to metaphysical neutrality and had to pick one metaphysics, it 
should pick that one. The other point is that this is just the metaphysics of 
lV; somebody wanting a different metaphysics could use different gadri. So 
Lojban could achieve metaphysical neutrality by offering a menu of different 
gadri.

>>>> 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 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?

Does 'proper subtype' mean "X is a proper subtype of Y iff X is a subtype of Y 
and X is not a subtype of a subtype of Y"? If so, then I think the notion is not 
applicable; any putatively proper subtype can be reconstrued as an improper one.

> 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!

I probably don't understand your question. Imagine a biological taxonomy, of 
genera, phyla, and so forth. If you can't see the root or the leaves of the 
taxonomic tree, you can't really identify levels.

>>>>> 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, 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.

Translating one metaphysics into another will generally yield problems. That 
cannot be fixed by changing the language. I surmise that you would like just one 
metaphysics for the language, and you would like it to be much more restricted 
than the most permissive sort. The objections to that are that it is 
metaphysically biased, that the metaphysics conflicts with the one that others 
might want, and that it is hard to implement as the basis of the semantics of 
default gadri.
  
>> "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?

I don't understand the question.
  
>> 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.

Have you thought about rules for default outer quantifiers  and scope 
interactions with negation, and so forth?

--And.

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