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From: "John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
Date: Sat, 12 Nov 2011 18:50:37 -0600
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OK.  To start with, I have to rewrite your example so that it makes a poten=
tial problem for me (& and x might insist there was the same possibility fo=
r {su'o cinfo cu broda} but I do disagree with them there).  So, if someone=
 says {su'o lo ctuca cu tavla ro le tadni}, and they mean a certain kind --=
 or some certain kinds -- of teachers talk to all the students, what can we=
 infer about individual students and teachers?  Surely that every student h=
as been talked to by at least one teacher {ro le tadni cu se tavla su'o ctu=
ci} and probably that each has been talked to by at least one kind of teach=
er (which follows from the first, assuming each teacher is of some kind or =
other).  Actually, that listing is backwards, since the second conclusion f=
ollows from the start just by  FLO.  The first conclusion involves some ass=
umption about how a kind of teacher talks to students;presumably collective=
ly but possibly conjunctively Or even distributively.  In the latter two ca=
ses, we get at least one teacher who talks to all students and, surely ever=
y student is talked to by some teacher.  In the collective case, there may =
not be one teacher who talks to every student, but they divvy up the task s=
o that every student gets a talking to and the result is still achieved.
Now, I agree that I escape some problems here by taking kinds to be bunches=
.  On the other hand, if they are not bunches, I have trouble working out w=
hat {su'o lo cinfo} means when it refers to a kind (rather than a bunch of =
kinds, say).  Of course, it is always safer to specify you level and Lojban=
 has at least a few devices for doing that.  But it is also often long-wind=
ed to do that when it is "perfectly clear" from context.  Whether either of=
 these will help with whatever xorxes is now about remains to be seen.  Pas=
t xorxes segments have been given to finding intensional content or mass co=
ntent in {lo} expression (for each of which there are, alas, historical pre=
cedents).  I also am a little worried about apparently focusing on the most=
 general uses of {lo} exressions and coming up with claims that do not fit =
the more restricted uses.

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:39 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * Wednesday, 2011-11-09 at 10:22 -0600 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yah=
oo.com>:
>=20
>> [...]
>>=20
>> 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.
>=20
> OK then. I'll reiterate, with all the clarity I can muster.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> Long version:
>=20
> The basic problem as I'm seeing it: if we don't specify levels, then we
> don't really specify quantifier scope.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> (Here I'm using 'actual' in opposition to 'kind' - I wish we had
> a better word for it)
>=20
> (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.)
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> (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
> from actual teachers as regards quantifier scope ambiguities, and that's
> all we need to know about it for the present discussion)
>=20
>=20
> 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.
>=20
> Martin

--=20
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