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Date: Sat, 5 Nov 2011 13:22:16 -0400
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
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Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
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* Saturday, 2011-11-05 at 12:06 +0000 - And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:

> I think the essential difference between us is indeed the
> semantic-metaphysics. On one view, the universe comes with
> a ready-made set of individuals, to which predicates apply;
> propositions make claims about those individuals. On the other view,
> the universe is one blob that can be split into uncountably infinitely
> many subtypes, defined by differentiation criteria.
>=20
> Here's a solution (v) then: have a couple of cmavo that mark these two
> views, the Ready-Made and the Blobular. I really think that would
> work.
>=20
> Obviously you're a Ready-Madeist, while me and xorxes are
> Blobularists. Traditional logic (i.e. what John Clifford calls
> Traditional Western Logic) and formal semantics is Ready-Madeist.
> Cognitive and natural-language-inspired approaches to semantics are
> Blobularist.

One of the main strengths of lojban, and a crucial difference between it
and natural languages, is the ability it gives us to precisely specify
the scope of quantifiers in a sentence. The rules aren't wholly
specified, but that's a temporary problem.

The question then is how to use these powerful mechanisms in actual
communication. Because of the quantifier-switching phenomenon we've been
discussing, these mechanisms are useful only if the listener understands
which levels the speaker means to refer to - where I define 'level' as
whatever it is that we go up one of when we get from an AE sentence to
a witness for the corresponding EA sentence.

The obvious way to solve this problem (and the one I had been assuming
until xorlo came along) is along the lines of your "Ready-Made view"
- certain predicates isolate certain levels. e.g. if lions cinfo then
lionkind (if that's at a level above) doesn't, and nor do lion-stages
(if a lion is at a level above its stages). This doesn't mean we have to
decide once and for all what constitutes a lion, as "Ready-Made" might
suggest, just that we have to specify cinfo well enough that there can
be no ambiguity between levels.

To reiterate the point: allowing cinfo to be ambiguous between levels
is, by the definition of 'level', effectively equivalent to allowing the
logical structure of sentences which involve quantifying over cinfo to
be ambiguous. Since ambiguity in logical structure is a no-no in lojban,
so should be such effective ambiguity, and hence so should be such
level-crossing ambiguity in the meaning of cinfo.

I am (still!) surprised that this could be controversial.


So where does this leave Blobularism? I fear it leaves it needing to
find a way to specify the levels its carving the Blob to. Sorry.

> I was tempted to change the Subject-line, but by now "{zo'e} as
> close-scope existentially quantified plural variable" has become the
> inalienable name of the thread, a name to which one has come to attach
> deep sentimental value.

I know... maybe we'll get back to {zo'e} eventually!

> >> If Barbie-like Beret is a malkind, then (B) is derivable
> >> from (A) only if it is also the case that all frenchmen wear the same
> >> beret; if they all wear different berets, you can't derive (B).
> >
> > Hmm? Doesn't (A) imply that all french people wear Barbie-Beret?
>=20
> Only metatruly. Under Blobularity, you first have to apply
> differentiation criteria to the universe before you can make claims
> about it.

Yes. And again: the problem is that we need to be able to *communicate*
what differentiation criteria are being used (at least to an extent
which rules out cross-level ambiguity), because otherwise we have
effective ambiguity in logical form.

> >> So it seems to me that either (A) doesn't entail (B) malkindfully or
> >> that xorxesianism is not malkindful.
> >
> > I don't see what you've done here.
>=20
> I hadn't realized you were talking about metatruth rather than truth.
> Truth would be assessed relative to a post-differentiational universe.
> Metatruth is assessed relative to the set of all possible
> post-differentiational universes: claims X and Y are
> metatruth-conditionally equivalent if there is a predifferentiational
> Blobular universe such that there are differentiation criteria that
> yield from it a postdifferentiational universe of which X is true and
> there are differentiation criteria that yield from it
> a postdifferentiational universe of which Y is true.

Yes; and the issue is that, informal conventions and contextual hints
aside, two sentences which are metatruth-conditionally equivalent
communicate the same information.

> >>>> Sure, we know what the difference between one lion and two lions is.
> >>>> But there are these cases where you can't tell the difference. And
> >>>> I think that these cases in which the speaker can't tell the
> >>>> difference should be generalized into a case where for whatever reas=
on
> >>>> the speaker doesn't tell the difference.
> >>>
> >>> But do we really need to create a new entity to do that? In examples
> >>> like the "lion(s) in your garden every day", we can just give a vague
> >>> count - {su'o cinfo}, in that case.
> >>
> >> Yes, but it looks like one lion, not like a group of one or more
> >> lions.
> >
> > Then {pa ju'o ru'e cinfo}?
>=20
> That doesn't sound like a very Baysian solution...

If you think there's only one lion but you're not sure, you should just
say so. I don't see the need to introduce a sense in which you'd be
right to say there was one lion even if there were more than one.

> I had been wondering whether to suggest {su'o cinfo pa mei}
> (disregarding the vagueness that tanru introduce), but I'm not sure
> whether or not that casts us into an infinite regression, since {PA
> broda} can always be recast (metatruly?) as {su'o broda PA mei}.

This is a sideissue, but actually my understanding of plural semantics
in lojban has {su'o re mei cu broda} being always false: only bunches of
size two satisfy remei, and {su'o broda cu brode} means that some *atom*
which brodas brodes. i.e. {su'o} is a singular quantifier.

(This has nothing to do with truth vs metatruth - my understanding of
lojban is purely formal semantical, with no domain-switching involved)

> >> There's only disagreement on beret-counting. Or Obama-counting: if
> >> I don't agree that there is only one Obama, then I'd object to you
> >> claiming that "ro prenu cu prami su'o Obama" and "su'o Obama cu se
> >> prami ro prenu" are equivalent.
> >
> > If you were happy to choose once and for all whether you want multiple
> > berets (one for each french person, say) or just Barbie-Beret, there
> > wouldn't be such a problem. But you want both, in different situations,
> > don't you? With all of them ransedyta'uing?
>=20
> Yes. Ready-Made and Blobular give different metatruthful results.
>=20
> --And.

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