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[80.193.151.146]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id gd6sm267620wbb.1.2011.10.17.16.54.58 (version=SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:54:59 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <4E9CC052.8010805@gmail.com> Date: Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:54:58 +0100 From: And Rosta User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.22) Gecko/20110902 Thunderbird/3.1.14 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable References: <1318202744.44997.YahooMailRC@web81306.mail.mud.yahoo.com> <20111013043308.GD3367@gonzales> <4E981179.1030805@gmail.com> <4E9A3F33.5050609@gmail.com> <4E9B80AF.30901@gmail.com> In-Reply-To: X-Original-Sender: and.rosta@gmail.com X-Original-Authentication-Results: gmr-mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: domain of and.rosta@gmail.com designates 74.125.82.175 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=and.rosta@gmail.com; dkim=pass (test mode) header.i=@gmail.com Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com Precedence: list Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com List-ID: X-Google-Group-Id: 1004133512417 List-Post: , List-Help: , List-Archive: Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com List-Subscribe: , List-Unsubscribe: , Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Spam-Score: -0.7 (/) X-Spam_score: -0.7 X-Spam_score_int: -6 X-Spam_bar: / Jorge Llamb=EDas, On 17/10/2011 02:55: > On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:11 PM, And Rosta wrote: >> Jorge Llamb=EDas, On 17/10/2011 01:31: >>> >>> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 11:19 PM, And Rosta wro= te: >>>> >>>> The commonest case where covert donkey sentences occur is with >>>> conditionals: >>>> "If you give me money, I'll spend it on drugs" =3D "Every possible >>>> circumstance in which there is money that you give me is a circumstanc= e >>>> in >>>> which there is money that you give me and I spend on drugs". I don't >>>> think >>>> your solution works for that. Applying your solution gives (I think) >>>> "Every >>>> circumstance is such that in it I spend all money that you give me", >>>> which >>>> has the wrong meaning. Crucially, the conditionals rely on restricted >>>> quantification (over circumstances in which such and such is the case)= . >>> >>> Why does it have the wrong meaning? Is it still wrong if you use "any" >>> instead of "all"? >> >> In apprehending underlying forms, we need to get rid of "any", since it = is >> an English reflection of a quantifier interacting with a conditional. > > I take "any" here to be the same as "all", except it is plain that it > has no existential import. I still don't see what problem you see in > "Every circumstance is such that in it, for all money, if you give it > to me I spend it on drugs" or any of its variants. "Every circumstance is such that in it, it is not the case that there is mo= ney that you give me and that I do not spend on drugs" -- that does without= "if" and sidesteps the existential import issue, and yes, it works. I reme= mber now I'd worked that out in 2004, with much more strenuous effort than = it took you, and then forgot and became fixated on repetition avoidance str= ategies other than simple reformulation. Oh hang on, just remembered. "Every circumstance" is the easy case. Right, = so the English example is "If you give me money, I'll probably spend it on = drugs". And this reduces to "Most circumstances in which there is money tha= t you give me arecircumstances in which there is money that you give me and= that I spend on drugs". Because the quantifier is "most", you can't do awa= y with the restricted quantification. Now turn yourself loose on solving th= at one! =20 >> But let's change "money" to "five quid": "Every circumstance is such tha= t in >> it I spend five quid that you give me". Wrong, obviously. > > "Every circumstance is such that in it I spend *every* five quid that > you give me". > >> Or try "If you >> tell me your name, I'll murmur it". > > I don't see that as a donkey sentence, since it doesn't even have quantif= iers. Yes, sorry. I think I was thinking of them both as nondonkey sentences that= wouldn't transform in the way you proposed to transform the donkey sentenc= es, but that wasn't really relevant to the discussion. >>> I think my solution would give: "For any money, if >>> you give it to me, I'll spend it on drugs" or "I'll spend on drugs any >>> money you give me". >> >> Underlying "if" and conditionals is a logical form that is either >> repretitious, "Every possible circumstance in which there is money that = you >> give me is a circumstance in which there is money that you give me and I >> spend on drugs", or else a donkey sentence, "Every possible circumstance= in >> which there is money that you give me is a circumstance in which I spend= it >> on drugs". So your challenge is to reformulate that, without using "if" = or >> "any", but without the repetition (of "there is money that you give me")= . > > I don't get why that is the challenge. In the original donkey > sentence, I did use "any" in replacement of the problematic "some": > You accepted "all farmers beat any donkey they own". It's what I see as the challenge. Reducing logical form to fundamentals inv= olves reducing conditionals to quantification over circumstances, and that = leads to lots of structures where donkey sentences appear to be avoidable o= nly by repetition. Things would have been clearer if I'd originally remembered i should choose= a quantifier like "most" that requires restricted quantification, because = obviously those are the cases that resist reformulation to avoid repetition= . =20 >>> I think the issue with donkey sentences is not so much reformulating >>> them in terms of ordinary first order logic, which can be done by >>> replacing the short scope existential by a wide scope universal. The >>> problematic issue is explaining what's going on, since this conversion >>> is not licensed by any rules of logic. >> >> I see what you're saying, but I think we have different understandings o= f >> the quintessence of donkey-sentencehood. > > For me it's that they have a pronoun whose antecedent is a bound > variable, but the pronoun is outside the scope of the quantifier > binding the variable... and yet they make sense. Indeed -- that's the angle relevant to natural language. =20 >> I take it to be when you have >> quantification within a restriction on a variable, in "for every X such = that >> there is a Y such that F(X,Y), there is a Y such that F(X,Y) and G(X,Y)"= , > > That's in non-donkey form. > >> which might be Englished as the less repetitious donkey-sentence "for ev= ery >> X such that there is a Y such that F(X,Y), G(X,Y)". > > Which is a donkey sentence, because the Y in G(X,Y) is outside the > scope of "there is a Y such that", so it should not be interpretable > in standard first order logic. > >> I see that as the quintessence of donkey-sentencehood not because that i= s >> how it is standardly seen in linguistics, but rather because that is the >> main problem they present for a logical language. > > The non-repetitious form of your sentence is: > > "for every Y and for every X such that F(X,Y), G(X,Y)". > > But the challenge is to explain why the apparently nonsensical form > has this sensical sense. The challenge for a logical language is to find a sensical form that is not= repetitious -- given that the essential goal of a logical language is to h= ave sensical forms without natlang ambiguity but without greater verbosity = than natlangs require. --And. --=20 You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "= lojban" group. To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegrou= ps.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban= ?hl=3Den.