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Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 12:39:01 -0500
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
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* Wednesday, 2011-11-09 at 10:22 -0600 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo=
=2Ecom>:

> [...]
>
> The point is that the word "lion" (and "lions") can indicate a number
> of different ontological levels, from the narrowest to the broadest
> and most abstract.  There is is, though, a default level that turns up
> in the absence of contrary contextual clues, even though it may be
> easily overridden by those clues.  We have words for the various
> levels, which we can use to explicitly set the level or change in mid
> discussion ("kind", "segment", "meat", "typically" and "species"
> roughly for the examples above).  Shifting without making note of the
> shift or starting off at the non-default level without a flag, is
> a Gricean misdemeanor.
>=20
> 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 abstracted level (there are twenty-six letters in the English
> alphabet).  Other words probably take lower levels, Buddhist technical
> terms for components of a person probably somewhere around the bottom.
> And, as the last example indicates, each level can be expressed in
> a number of ways.
>=20
> 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 same fluidity of levels in Lojban and whether certain moves
> constitute misdemeanor violation level shifting.  That is, what
> brodas?  Or, perhaps more precisely, what brodas in what way?
> A single thing may broda individually; a bunch may do so collectively,
> or conjunctively, or disjunctively, or statistically, or in many more
> complex ways.  Also involved is the nature of some levels: are kinds
> just bunches of things or are the intensional objects of some sort?
> Are segments parts of objects or independent things to which objects
> may be related in a way analogous to the way kinds are related to
> objects?  In general, no side has been very clear (at least in
> a single continuous statement) on any of these issues, making the
> whole rather difficult to follow, let alone to critique.  Hopefully,
> this will change.

OK then. I'll reiterate, with all the clarity I can muster.

Short version: {su'o cinfo cu broda} has to mean that some actual lion
brodas. Otherwise we have problems. This is largely independent of the
meaning of {lo cinfo cu broda}, but not of the explanation of that
meaning.

Long version:

The basic problem as I'm seeing it: if we don't specify levels, then we
don't really specify quantifier scope.

What I mean by this (i.e. by "really"): if B hears A say {su'o ctuca cu
tavla ro le tadni}, and B wants to understand what A means to say about
actual teachers and actual students, and if {ctuca} and {tadni} do not
specify levels, then B has to guess which levels A intends them to refer
to. If, for example, B guesses that A is talking about kinds of teacher
and about actual students, all B can deduce about actual teachers and
students is that every student was talked to by some teacher.

(Here I'm using 'actual' in opposition to 'kind' - I wish we had
a better word for it)

(I should also clarify that when I say "{ctuca} does not specify
a level", I mean that there are *individuals* which are e.g. kinds of
teachers and which ctuca; if a kind were implemented as being merely
a bunch of actual teachers, we wouldn't have the problems I'm talking
about.)

So I conclude that it is not befitting of a logical language for it to
have no means to specify level - where 'level' refers to whatever it is
that crossing causes these quantifier scope shifts.

This does not mean that I think lojban should only be able to discuss
actual teachers and not kinds of teachers - merely that we need to be
able to distinguish between the two.

I further note that xorlo - or rather, my understanding of xorxes'
understanding of xorlo - makes this issue less academic than it might
otherwise be. That's because it has descriptions, e.g. {lo ctuca},
habitually (though not always) referring to (bunches of) corresponding
kinds, e.g. to the kind Teacher.

So under xorxes' xorlo, kinds are not rare things summoned up only when
we specifically want to talk about them - you have to deal with them if
you want to understand any sentence using a gadri.

(Here I'm using "the kind Teacher" to refer to the whatever-it-is that
xorxes habitually refers to with {lo ctuca}; I have so far failed to
understand what this is, but it seems that whatever it is is a level up
=66rom actual teachers as regards quantifier scope ambiguities, and that's
all we need to know about it for the present discussion)


This leaves the question of how to deal with this problem; we have
various partial answers, but perhaps I shouldn't complicate this thread
by discussing them here.

Martin

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