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Date: Sun, 23 Oct 2011 14:15:01 -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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Maybe I shouldn't have made the Buddhist crack, it does complicate matters.  If 
you take different times as separate worlds, then the ever-new view of domains 
does turn out to be like xorxes stages.  That is certainly not my intention, on 
either view (though the problem doesn't arise on the always-same view) [I 
actually tend to be a nominalist in a rather strict sense and so closer to Hans' 
discourse representation, which never officially gets behind the words. But that 
is not relevant here.]  But given that alway-new sense and taking times as 
worlds, your description of the situation is essentially correct (and its vague 
feeling of absurdity is one of the problems with that interpretation).  The 
connection between the two sets of albatrosses is not merely anaphora, but 
something involving vectors in time or some such analogy - "world lines" is a 
nice cover term (which, alas, also seem to reify the connections -- an old 
problem for Buddhists, too).  Of course, "here now" does cut things down to 
existents, pretty sharply (I suppose someone could argue, .... .  But why 
bother?). The point is that Lojban quantifiers do not add "and exists", ever.  
That comes out of the predicates, if at all.  As to whether the former flying 
albatrosses are flying now, that is hard to say (partly because it is unclear 
just what is being asked); in some cases they are in the current domain of 
discourse and in the extensions of both "albatross" and "flying", but it is not 
clear whether the current domain of discourse is tightly correlated with "now".  
And, of course, there is no rule that requires either the always-new 
interpretation of things nor the worlds view of time.  There are advantages and 
disadvantages to all of these choices.  A reasonable view (except for the 
complexities that spelling it out exactly involves) is that each world extends 
through time, with things coming into existence and falling out as time goes 
along, i.e., that our world is a typical world.  The formal gains of deviating 
from this view have to be pretty impressive to justify shifting from it.  On 
that view, the ten minutes ago's flying albatrosses still exist (most of them 
anyhow usually) but are no longer flying (the ones we can see, anyhow) and they 
did look funny and so contribute to the general claim that flying albatrosses 
look funny, even though they now look quite sedate -- largely because they are 
not flying.


----- Original Message ----
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, October 23, 2011 3:36:58 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

* Saturday, 2011-10-22 at 11:27 -0700 - John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:

> "There aren't any" is ambiguous in these situations.  I try to use it only when 
>
> I mean there are none in the domain.  But it can also mean "there don't exist," 
>
> that is, the intersection of zasti and cipnrdodo is null.  In this latter 
>sense, 
>
> your sentence presents no problem: they are in the non-existents' part of the 
> domain.
> In the former sense, however, a suitably expressed Lojban sentence, 
> with {lo [flying] cipnrdodo}  as the first subject and the second part being  
> {no da ca ca'e cipnrdodo} would be contradictory, i.e. really really false.
> 
> As for taking one kind of model as a special case of the other, the best you 
>can 
>
> hope for is something close to an isomorphism.  In the first, it is important 
> that the items in various worlds are actually identical, the very same thing in 
>
> each world in which it occurs (svatman).  In the other it is equally important 

> that things in one world never occur in another one but are, at best, joined 
> with things in other worlds by various kind of causal, etc. chains (karma, 
> say).  The first makes it possible to say"suppose Socrates were an 18th century 
>
> Irish washerwoman" but make it impossible to draw meaningful conclusions from 
> that supposition, the second makes the hypothetical hard to state, but, 
>assuming 
>
> that being Socrates is something more than a unitary haeceity, might be able to 
>
> make some plausible predictions.

Maybe I understand you.

I'm not sure how this differs from xorxes' "stages"; it seems rather
similar.

But let me see if I'm actually with you.

So if I wanted to say "those albatrosses looked mighty silly when they
were in flight a few minutes ago; I'm glad they've landed now", there
would be two sets of albatrosses in the domain - the flying ones and the
landed ones - and the fact that the anaphora manages to get from the
former to the latter is due to some complicated linkages between these
two sets. The flying ones don't satisfy "now exist", unlike the landed
ones, but they do satisfy "is an albatross" and "is flying".

Quantifiers and other constructs often add an implicit "and exist", so
e.g. I get the right count if I ask how many albatrosses are currently
here, and I can say that none of the albatrosses here are flying. (That
I get the right count even if I ask how many albatrosses have been here
recently is due to something more complicated involving the linkages (we
effectively count albatross world-lines, presumably).)

Now the tricky point is that some constructs *don't* add an implicit
"and exist", so I can say something general about albatrosses and pick
up both the landed and flying albatrosses; similarly I can say "flying
albatrosses look silly" and have our flying albatrosses as referents of
"flying albatrosses" - because even though they don't exist now, they
*are* flying now.

Was this your intention?

I must say, it seems rather complicated and unintuitive to me.

Martin

> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
> To: lojban@googlegroups.com
> Sent: Fri, October 21, 2011 10:08:01 PM
> Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
> variable
> 
> * Friday, 2011-10-21 at 15:43 -0400 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> 
> > I'm not too clear on what you thought I was proposing, though it must
> > not be too far from what I have in mind.  I am not sure that Hans'
> > paper will help you much, for, while I taken over some things from him
> > in terms of dynamic domains and alternate domains, I have developed
> > somewhat differently, as Lojban seems to require.
> 
> I would be interested to hear about what you've developed.
> 
> > Particular quantification is the old term for existential
> > quantification, with the advantage that it does not appear to claim
> > more than something is in the domain, in particular, does not appear
> > to claim it is the extension of "exist" {zasti}.
> 
> Ah! Then yes, please read 'particular' whenever I write 'existential'.
> 
> > Sorry about the mumble there; I am just never sure which procedure
> > works best: a supply of things that turn up in different guises in
> > each world or a different set of things for each world, somehow
> > sometimes linked between worlds.  Neither is perfect, but each has
> > it's uses. (Hindu v. Buddhist, as so many things are).
> 
> Well, the former is essentially a special case of the latter - namely
> where the links consist of a coherent family of bijections. I'm not sure
> what the latter would help with.
> 
> I don't yet understand how you deal with the flying dodos. Slightly more
> specifically, how you'd handle "flying dodos look silly, but there
> aren't actually now any flying dodos".
> 
> Martin
> 
> > On Oct 21, 2011, at 15:00, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> > 
> > > * Friday, 2011-10-21 at 08:46 -0700 - John E Clifford 
> <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> > > 
> > >> If you want to say that flying dodos look silly, then your domain of 
> >discourse 
> >
> > >> (at least in Lojban) contains flying dodos.  {lo} expressions always imply 
>
> >the 
> >
> > >> particular quantification on their defining predication.  Not that such 
> >things 
> >
> > >> need exist, of course (part of the reason I use "particular" rather than 
> > >> "existential" for that quantifier)
> > > What's particular quantification? I'm not familiar with the term.
> > > 
> > >> It is not clear that this is a different approach to tense and
> > >> intensions, though it may be a different approach to domains of
> > >> discourse (looking at Kamp again).
> > > 
> > > Discourse representation theory? Should I just read about that if I want
> > > to understand you? I think I do have Kamp's paper on my harddrive.
> > > 
> > >> The properties these nonexistent things may have probably derive from
> > >> the ones they have in worlds where they exist (not necessarily the
> > >> same things, mind you, but the things at the other end of some sort of
> > >> projection)
> > > 
> > > Not really with you here.
> > > 
> > > Well, it seems that I didn't understand correctly your solution. I don't
> > > see much wrong with the solution I understood you as proposing... but
> > > I'm happy to have multiple working solutions before having to pick one!
> 
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