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Subject: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
From: "John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>
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Date: Wed, 9 Nov 2011 10:22:36 -0600
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If someone asks, out of the blue, how many lions there are and I say "About=
 12,000", my answer may be wrong but it is the right sort of answer.  If th=
e gotcha questioner says "no, there are four" I can righteously respond "He=
y, there are five just in our Zoo".  If he goes on to explain  "The Europea=
n (now extinct), the African, the Indian, and the Asiatic", I might exclaim=
 "Oh, you meant *kinds* of lions!".  Yet, had he begun the conversation wit=
h "There are four lions: the European, the Asiatic, the Indian, and the Afr=
ican", I would have understood him fine and had no complaints. I would equa=
lly have no problems with "That lion is the same as the one we saw yesterda=
y" nor, probably, with "Lion (or lions) is (are) quite tasty, when marinate=
d in monkey-brain sauce and roasted over an open fire", nor "Lions eat gaze=
lles" nor "A/The lion is/Lions are the second largest cat".  And so on thro=
ugh countless other examples.=20

The point is that the word "lion" (and "lions") can indicate a number of di=
fferent ontological levels, from the narrowest to the broadest and most abs=
tract.  There is is, though, a default level that turns up in the absence o=
f contrary contextual clues, even though it may be easily overridden by tho=
se clues.  We have words for the various levels, which we can use to explic=
itly set the level or change in mid discussion ("kind", "segment", "meat", =
"typically" and "species" roughly for the examples above).  Shifting withou=
t making note of the shift or starting off at the non-default level without=
 a flag, is a Gricean misdemeanor.

What the default level is for a given word varies from word to word: "lion"=
 takes sort of midlevel gross physical objects, "letter" takes a highly abs=
tracted level (there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet).  Othe=
r words probably take lower levels, Buddhist technical terms for components=
 of a person probably somewhere around the bottom.  And, as the last exampl=
e indicates, each level can be expressed in a number of ways.

As far as I can figure out, the recent discussion on the {zo'e} thread (or =
at least one or two of those discussions) hinges on whether we have the sam=
e fluidity of levels in Lojban and whether certain moves constitute misdeme=
anor violation level shifting.  That is, what brodas?  Or, perhaps more pre=
cisely, what brodas in what way?   A single thing may broda individually; a=
 bunch may do so collectively, or conjunctively, or disjunctively, or stati=
stically, or in many more complex ways.  Also involved is the nature of som=
e levels: are kinds just bunches of things or are the intensional objects o=
f some sort? Are segments parts of objects or independent things to which o=
bjects may be related in a way analogous to the way kinds are related to ob=
jects?  In general, no side has been very clear (at least in a single conti=
nuous statement) on any of these issues, making the whole rather difficult =
to follow, let alone to critique.  Hopefully, this will change.
Sent from my iPad

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