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[80.193.151.146]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id gd18sm7293801wbb.5.2011.10.18.20.59.59 (version=SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:00:00 -0700 (PDT) Message-ID: <4E9E4B3E.2080001@gmail.com> Date: Wed, 19 Oct 2011 04:59:58 +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> <20111014225934.GC3111@gonzales> <4E98D899.7080608@gmail.com> <20111015200404.GB3090@gonzales> <4E9A39C9.3010605@gmail.com> <20111016050503.GA21114@gonzales> <4E9B77B1.2050608@gmail.com> <20111018032657.GO21114@gonzales> In-Reply-To: <20111018032657.GO21114@gonzales> 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 74.125.82.44 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 X-Spam-Score: -0.7 (/) X-Spam_score: -0.7 X-Spam_score_int: -6 X-Spam_bar: / Martin Bays, On 18/10/2011 04:26: > Ah! Have {lo} *only* able to get kinds, you mean? Yes. With anything that looks like a 'mundane' reconceived as a kind. > That would indeed deal > with my main issue with kinds+xorlo. But presumably xorxes wouldn't like it. Really? That's not my impression. >>>>> 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". > > Right... and "Elvis is not in my garden" could mean either "no Elvis is > in my garden" or "the Elvis is not in my garden". Yes, 'Elvis' in the > first sentence does seem to refer to a kind. But it isn't referring to > anyone called Elvis, so I don't see that this shows that Elvis has > stages. > > The "temporal stages of Obama" example could be dealt with by > intepreting Obama as the kind 'Obama-stages', I agree, but it could also > be dealt with just by using tenses. I'm not sure how to deal with "an > unusually exuberant Obama"... but since it's a rare construction, a hack > like transforming it to "Obama, who was unusually exuberant" would seem > reasonable. The point is that English does allow restrictive modification of _Obama_, so does recognize subtypes of Obama. >> 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. > > But it requires a metaphysics which has kinds. That seems pretty > restrictive to me. The metaphysics has nothing but kinds, but has an infinitude of kinds; the lack of restrictiveness is in the infinitude. But I don't think this point about permissiveness is worth pressing. >> 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. > > But they're not isolated. If lV forces you to put kinds in your > universe, then (at least unless we introduce rules to prevent it) > quantifiers like {da poi broda} and {ro broda} will pick them up. > > So if I choose to omit kinds from my universe but otherwise use the same > rules, I am likely to be misunderstood by a kind-using lojbanist, even > if I avoid using lV. Xorxes just gave a nice example, the other way > round: {mi zukte da poi do zukte} makes a sense with kinds that it > doesn't without them. You may be likely to be misunderstood, but that's because of philosophical differences between you, not linguistic differences. You don't have to agree on whether{mi zukte da poi do zukte} couod be true. > The metaphysics affects everything. I don't see that the language could > be considered well-specified if it didn't specify the metaphysics (on > the broad level we're talking about). Lojban with plural semantics is > very different from that without it; the same goes for kinds. The language specifies the metaphysics that the language encodes, but that doesn't tell you how the universe actually is. > My question is whether you perceive a "jump" between individual lions > and the kind 'lions' of a different kind from that between the kinds > 'fierce lions' and 'lions'. I don't think it's actually a precise > question about the structure of the partial order... it's rather that > I'd split "subtype" into two relations - "instance of" and "subclass > of". I understand your questions. The answer is a very definite No. There are only types, related by the Subtype relation; and there are no instances. I think it would be good to have other gadri based on a model in which there are no types, only instances. >>>>>>> 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. > > If the permissive one could be handled without introducing the > (effective) ambiguities we've been talking about, I'd be happy. It may be, though, that the effective ambiguities inhere in any translation from type-only to instance-only models, so is inescapable. >> The objections to that are that it is metaphysically biased, > > Why is that a problem? Avoidance of metaphysical bias was one of Lojban's aims. A fairly obvious and sensible one, since the language should not tell the speaker how the universe is, but rather should allow the speaker to describe how the speaker thinks the universe is. >> 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. > > Does every mammal give birth to live young? At the species level yes (afaik), at the organism level no. ---and. -- 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@googlegroups.com. 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