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Date: Mon, 7 Nov 2011 07:29:16 -0800 (PST)
From: John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
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I thought I sort of understood what blobularism was, but now I am considerably 
less sure -- and getting more so the more I read.  A nice straightforward 
account would be useful as Hell.  What I understand seems to me to be totally 
compatible with what I take to be the Readymadeist position (or at least the SAE 
metaphysics) and with what I understand to be the process of language-learning 
and the nature of linguistic constructs,  So, I don't see the conflict, which, 
apparently means I am missing something crucial.  What?


----- Original Message ----
From: And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, November 5, 2011 1:41:29 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

Martin Bays, On 05/11/2011 17:22:
> * 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.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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.

Setting aside the unfinishedness of the rules, quantifier scope is unambiguous 
in Lojban, regardless of whether the sentence is uttered in Ready-Made or 
Blobular. That is, the logical form is unambiguous. If we inhabit a blobular 
universe, then the applicability of the logical form to the universe is 
ambiguous, precisely because logical forms can be applied only 
post-differentiationally.

> 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.

Ready-Made is not a *solution* to the communication problem, because it is 
inapplicable to a blobular world. How do blobularists communicate about a 
blobular world?

A Ready-Madeist may be aghast at the Blobularist universe, but the Ready-Madeist 
can do nothing about that. The Blobularist universe is a fact, and banning 
linguistic representations of it is hardly acceptable.
  
> 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.

First of all, if you want to insist that Blobularism has to specify levels, then 
why not also insist that Ready-Made must too? Otherwise you'd be requiring that 
almost all sentences expressible in Blobularist Lojban would be unexpressible in 
Ready-Madeist Lojban.

Second, why must the levels be specifiable? The idea is nonsensical to 
Blobularism, because even the number of levels is uncountably infinite. 
Ready-Madeists horrified by that can take refuge in Ready-Madeist Lojban.

>>>> 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?
>>
>> 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.

That effective ambiguity is an inescapable fact of the Blobularist universe. 
That sort of predifferentiational disambiguation is impossible.
  
>>>> 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.
>>
>> 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.

Two such sentences *encode* different information. Two such *utterances* may 
communicate  the same information, but firstly utterances do have a pragmatic 
context -- that's how language works, and a context-free language would be 
impossibly impoverished -- and secondly it's not an issue, it's a settled fact.
  
>>>>>> 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 reason
>>>>>> 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}?
>>
>> 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.

Okay, but in the case under discussion, you've got something that looks like one 
lion but might be several. The speaker is sure it looks like one lion and sure 
that it mightn't be one. All the available diagnostics point to it being one 
lion, but not enough diagnostics are available. If you were to draw it or 
describe it, it would be like drawing or describing one lion. Still, I suppose 
Ready-Madeism would have to just use {su'o cinfo}.

--and.

--And.

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