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Subject: [lojban] Lojban and Truth-Conditional Semantics
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coi rodo,

This xorlo/Mr. broda/kinds/intension/etc/(now recently: "levels") thing
goes back and forth and never ends and, I fear, never gets anywhere.  As a
longtime lurker and sporadic Lojban learner admittedly not necessarily
fully up to snuff on these highly technical topics, I'm going to go out on
a limb here and take a pop shot in this interminal conversation, which I
have long been observing with interest, and sometimes even amusement, for
years (I'm guessing that I have read thousands upon thousands of posts on
these issues).  The only way, I suspect, that jbo(ske)pre are ever going to
sort out some of these sticky issues involving gadri and related stuff is
by adopting a much stronger and more rigorous formalism than has been
adopted up to now.  Ultimately it would require a very good
mathematician/logician to work out the whole system and then break it down
for others (in English or Spanish or whatever metalanguage).  There are
many ways to go, but I think what might best serve a logical language is a
formalism focused on model-theoretical, truth-conditional semantics.  In
other words, from any given Lojan sentence S, e.g. "su'o lo ctuca cu tavla
ro le tadni", one ought to be able to work out, in a straightforward
manner, every truth condition that would make S true with respect to an
interpretation of basic terms (e.g. descriptions & predicates) and a given
model (universe of discourse).  If the truth conditions hinge on context
(and such hinging might be universal in human languages; I just don't
know), then the formalism should specify how to interpret S against any
context -- you might want to check into discourse representation theory
(DRT) for ideas on how to handle this.  But I think the goal should be an
algorithm like this: given any Lojban sentence S,  enumerate the conditions
that are true exactly if S is true.  (After that, make sure that any of the
various propositions that humans want to say are sayable.  And if you
really want to get fancy, explain what and how various logical entailments
can be inferred from any Lojban sentence S. But for right now, interpreting
Lojban as it stands should be the goal.)  To give a trivial example of how
truth-conditions might be specified very, very informally using English as
the metalanguage:

S = "la meris prami la djan."

The truth conditions of S are (tentatively) as follows:

- There is an individual entity M whom Speaker denotes as "meris"
- There is an individual entity J whom Speaker denotes as "djan"
- There is a predicate relationship (x1, x2) denoted as "prami",
interpreted as the set of all ordered pairs of individuals such that x1
loves x2 (full encyclopedia definition of a predicate can be cited as
needed).
- prami'(M, J) is true.  In other words, M loves J.

These conditions could and probably should be given more formally than
this, but as given, they at least suggest the idea.  Deriving these
conditions can be tedious, and if the system is mathematically/logically
formalized, it will get even more tedious -- much more so.  It will be
immensely more complicated by adding kinds, quantification, masses,
plurals, tenses, modalities, worlds, intensional constructs, and so on.
But quite a bit of research along these lines have been done in natlangs,
and ultimately I think this is the approach that is needed for Lojban.  By
some method, every S has to be broken down into a finite set of basic truth
conditions, and those truth conditions should be expressible both formally
in a mathematical metalanguage, and informally in plain English or other
natlang.  Along these lines, eventually I think someone has to go to the
trouble of working out a complete, systematic formalization of Lojban
semantics. Perhaps one could start with simple things and add one language
feature at a time, and then periodically go back and organize and
straighten everything out, until everything works together.  For example,
one could:

1. Give the truth conditions for "lo broda cu brode" (possibly under DRT
context)
2. Give the truth conditions for "su'o broda cu brode" (possibly under DRT
context)
3. Give the truth conditions for "ro broda cu brode" (possibly under DRT
context)
...
101. Give the truth conditions for "lo broda cu brode lo brodi" (possibly
under DRT context)
102. Give the truth conditions for "su'o broda cu brode lo brodi" (possibly
under DRT context)
...
1001
etc.

The idea here is to describe the semantics of the most primitive formulas,
and then systematically build up the framework to describe ever more
complex formulas.  Taking into account recursion, scope, interactions, etc.
eventually every sentence in the whole language should be reducible to
enumerable truth conditions.  Also, and this would follow from the
principle of compositionality and and from Lojban's already existing
syntactic non-ambiguity, semantics would parallel syntax and every
constituent of Lojban would have one meaning -- and ideally transparently
so.

There are other formalisms out there (which I am less familiar with),
besides the truth-conditional and model-theoretic thing I've very, very
crudely outlined, but I suspect that something like what I am trying to
describe would be advantageous.  Montague had a very similar approach to
English, and his program is generally acknowledged to be a promising
system.  At the very least, it seems to me the best hope to underpin any
"logical language".

With all due respect to interlocutors, and despite all the best intentions,
there seems to have been a good deal of handwaving and wheel-spinning in
these years-long, possibly decades-long conversations.  Can we yet describe
what every Lojban sentence means?  It seems not.  And the discussions go on
and on.  And on.  And on and on and on.  (And frankly I still don't know
what "Mr. Broda" means.)  I suggest that mapping words to meanings
expressible both formally and informally in metalanguage might be a fresh
approach.  I suspect that even an informally specified program intent on
producing truth conditions from ordinary Lojban sentences might be a
constructive approach towards grappling with these thorny issues.  I mean
this all quite respectfully, words to the wise.  It's just my 2c on a late
Saturday night.

Best
mu'o mi'e .maik.


On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 7:50 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>wrote:

> OK.  To start with, I have to rewrite your example so that it makes a
> potential problem for me (& and x might insist there was the same
> possibility for {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 has been talked to by at least one teacher {ro le tadni
> cu se tavla su'o ctuci} and probably that each has been talked to by at
> least one kind of teacher (which follows from the first, assuming each
> teacher is of some kind or other).  Actually, that listing is backwards,
> since the second conclusion follows from the start just by  FLO.  The first
> conclusion involves some assumption about how a kind of teacher talks to
> students;presumably collectively but possibly conjunctively Or even
> distributively.  In the latter two cases, we get at least one teacher who
> talks to all students and, surely every 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 so 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 what {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-winded 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.  Past xorxes segments have been given to finding
> intensional content or mass content in {lo} expression (for each of which
> there are, alas, historical precedents).  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@yahoo.com>:
> >
> >> [...]
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> 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
> > from 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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coi rodo,<br><br>This xorlo/Mr. broda/kinds/intension/etc/(now recently: &q=
uot;levels&quot;) thing goes back and forth and never ends and, I fear, nev=
er gets anywhere.=A0 As a longtime lurker and sporadic Lojban learner admit=
tedly not necessarily fully up to snuff on these highly technical topics, I=
&#39;m going to go out on a limb here and take a pop shot in this intermina=
l conversation, which I have long been observing with interest, and sometim=
es even amusement, for years (I&#39;m guessing that I have read thousands u=
pon thousands of posts on these issues).=A0 The only way, I suspect, that j=
bo(ske)pre are ever going to sort out some of these sticky issues involving=
 gadri and related stuff is by adopting a much stronger and more rigorous f=
ormalism than has been adopted up to now.=A0 Ultimately it would require a =
very good mathematician/logician to work out the whole system and then brea=
k it down for others (in English or Spanish or whatever metalanguage).=A0 T=
here are many ways to go, but I think what might best serve a logical langu=
age is a formalism focused on model-theoretical, truth-conditional semantic=
s.=A0 In other words, from any given Lojan sentence S, e.g. &quot;su&#39;o =
lo ctuca cu tavla ro le tadni&quot;, one ought to be able to work out, in a=
 straightforward manner, every truth condition that would make S true with =
respect to an interpretation of basic terms (e.g. descriptions &amp; predic=
ates) and a given model (universe of discourse).=A0 If the truth conditions=
 hinge on context (and such hinging might be universal in human languages; =
I just don&#39;t know), then the formalism should specify how to interpret =
S against any context -- you might want to check into discourse representat=
ion theory (DRT) for ideas on how to handle this.=A0 But I think the goal s=
hould be an algorithm like this: given any Lojban sentence S,=A0 enumerate =
the conditions that are true exactly if S is true.=A0 (After that, make sur=
e that any of the various propositions that humans want to say are sayable.=
=A0 And if you really want to get fancy, explain what and how various logic=
al entailments can be inferred from any Lojban sentence S. But for right no=
w, interpreting Lojban as it stands should be the goal.)=A0 To give a trivi=
al example of how truth-conditions might be specified very, very informally=
 using English as the metalanguage:<br>
<br>S =3D &quot;la meris prami la djan.&quot;<br><br>The truth conditions o=
f S are (tentatively) as follows:<br><br>- There is an individual entity M =
whom Speaker denotes as &quot;meris&quot;<br>- There is an individual entit=
y J whom Speaker denotes as &quot;djan&quot;<br>
- There is a predicate relationship (x1, x2) denoted as &quot;prami&quot;, =
interpreted as the set of all ordered pairs of individuals such that x1 lov=
es x2 (full encyclopedia definition of a predicate can be cited as needed).=
<br>
- prami&#39;(M, J) is true.=A0 In other words, M loves J.<br><br>These cond=
itions could and probably should be given more formally than this, but as g=
iven, they at least suggest the idea.=A0 Deriving these conditions can be t=
edious, and if the system is mathematically/logically formalized, it will g=
et even more tedious -- much more so.=A0 It will be immensely more complica=
ted by adding kinds, quantification, masses, plurals, tenses, modalities, w=
orlds, intensional constructs, and so on.=A0 But quite a bit of research al=
ong these lines have been done in natlangs, and ultimately I think this is =
the approach that is needed for Lojban.=A0 By some method, every S has to b=
e broken down into a finite set of basic truth conditions, and those truth =
conditions should be expressible both formally in a mathematical metalangua=
ge, and informally in plain English or other natlang.=A0 Along these lines,=
 eventually I think someone has to go to the trouble of working out a compl=
ete, systematic formalization of Lojban semantics. Perhaps one could start =
with simple things and add one language feature at a time, and then periodi=
cally go back and organize and straighten everything out, until everything =
works together.=A0 For example, one could:<br>
<br>1. Give the truth conditions for &quot;lo broda cu brode&quot; (possibl=
y under DRT context)<br>2. Give the truth conditions for &quot;su&#39;o bro=
da cu brode&quot; (possibly under DRT context) <br>
3. Give the truth conditions for &quot;ro broda cu brode&quot; (possibly un=
der DRT context) <br>...<br>
101. Give the truth conditions for &quot;lo broda cu brode lo brodi&quot; (=
possibly under DRT context) <br>


102. Give the truth conditions for &quot;su&#39;o broda cu brode lo brodi&q=
uot; (possibly under DRT context) <br>

...<br>1001<br>etc.<br><br>The idea here is to describe the semantics of th=
e most primitive formulas, and then systematically build up the framework t=
o describe ever more complex formulas.=A0 Taking into account recursion, sc=
ope, interactions, etc. eventually every sentence in the whole language sho=
uld be reducible to enumerable truth conditions.=A0 Also, and this would fo=
llow from the principle of compositionality and and from Lojban&#39;s alrea=
dy existing syntactic non-ambiguity, semantics would parallel syntax and ev=
ery constituent of Lojban would have one meaning -- and ideally transparent=
ly so.=A0 <br>
<br>There are other formalisms out there (which I am less familiar with), b=
esides the truth-conditional and model-theoretic thing I&#39;ve very, very =
crudely outlined, but I suspect that something like what I am trying to des=
cribe would be advantageous.=A0 Montague had a very similar approach to Eng=
lish, and his program is generally acknowledged to be a promising system.=
=A0 At the very least, it seems to me the best hope to underpin any &quot;l=
ogical language&quot;.<br>
<br>With all due respect to interlocutors, and despite all the best intenti=
ons, there seems to have been a good deal of handwaving and wheel-spinning =
in these years-long, possibly decades-long conversations.=A0 Can we yet des=
cribe what every Lojban sentence means?=A0 It seems not.=A0 And the discuss=
ions go on and on.=A0 And on.=A0 And on and on and on.=A0 (And frankly I st=
ill don&#39;t know what &quot;Mr. Broda&quot; means.)=A0 I suggest that map=
ping words to meanings expressible both formally and informally in metalang=
uage might be a fresh approach.=A0 I suspect that even an informally specif=
ied program intent on producing truth conditions from ordinary Lojban sente=
nces might be a constructive approach towards grappling with these thorny i=
ssues.=A0 I mean this all quite respectfully, words to the wise.=A0 It&#39;=
s just my 2c on a late Saturday night.=A0 <br>
<br>Best<br>mu&#39;o mi&#39;e .maik.<br><br><br><br><div class=3D"gmail_quo=
te">On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 7:50 PM, John E. Clifford <span dir=3D"ltr">&lt=
;<a href=3D"mailto:kali9putra@yahoo.com">kali9putra@yahoo.com</a>&gt;</span=
> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class=3D"gmail_quote" style=3D"margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; borde=
r-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">OK. =A0To start w=
ith, I have to rewrite your example so that it makes a potential problem fo=
r me (&amp; and x might insist there was the same possibility for {su&#39;o=
 cinfo cu broda} but I do disagree with them there). =A0So, if someone says=
 {su&#39;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? =A0Surely that every student =
has been talked to by at least one teacher {ro le tadni cu se tavla su&#39;=
o ctuci} and probably that each has been talked to by at least one kind of =
teacher (which follows from the first, assuming each teacher is of some kin=
d or other). =A0Actually, that listing is backwards, since the second concl=
usion follows from the start just by =A0FLO. =A0The first conclusion involv=
es some assumption about how a kind of teacher talks to students;presumably=
 collectively but possibly conjunctively Or even distributively. =A0In the =
latter two cases, we get at least one teacher who talks to all students and=
, surely every student is talked to by some teacher. =A0In the collective c=
ase, there may not be one teacher who talks to every student, but they divv=
y up the task so that every student gets a talking to and the result is sti=
ll achieved.<br>

Now, I agree that I escape some problems here by taking kinds to be bunches=
. =A0On the other hand, if they are not bunches, I have trouble working out=
 what {su&#39;o lo cinfo} means when it refers to a kind (rather than a bun=
ch of kinds, say). =A0Of course, it is always safer to specify you level an=
d Lojban has at least a few devices for doing that. =A0But it is also often=
 long-winded to do that when it is &quot;perfectly clear&quot; from context=
. =A0Whether either of these will help with whatever xorxes is now about re=
mains to be seen. =A0Past xorxes segments have been given to finding intens=
ional content or mass content in {lo} expression (for each of which there a=
re, alas, historical precedents). =A0I also am a little worried about appar=
ently focusing on the most general uses of {lo} exressions and coming up wi=
th claims that do not fit the more restricted uses.<br>

<br>
Sent from my iPad<br>
<div><div></div><div class=3D"h5"><br>
On Nov 12, 2011, at 11:39 AM, Martin Bays &lt;<a href=3D"mailto:mbays@sdf.o=
rg">mbays@sdf.org</a>&gt; wrote:<br>
<br>
&gt; * Wednesday, 2011-11-09 at 10:22 -0600 - John E. Clifford &lt;<a href=
=3D"mailto:kali9putra@yahoo.com">kali9putra@yahoo.com</a>&gt;:<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt;&gt; [...]<br>
&gt;&gt;<br>
&gt;&gt; The point is that the word &quot;lion&quot; (and &quot;lions&quot;=
) can indicate a number<br>
&gt;&gt; of different ontological levels, from the narrowest to the broades=
t<br>
&gt;&gt; and most abstract. =A0There is is, though, a default level that tu=
rns up<br>
&gt;&gt; in the absence of contrary contextual clues, even though it may be=
<br>
&gt;&gt; easily overridden by those clues. =A0We have words for the various=
<br>
&gt;&gt; levels, which we can use to explicitly set the level or change in =
mid<br>
&gt;&gt; discussion (&quot;kind&quot;, &quot;segment&quot;, &quot;meat&quot=
;, &quot;typically&quot; and &quot;species&quot;<br>
&gt;&gt; roughly for the examples above). =A0Shifting without making note o=
f the<br>
&gt;&gt; shift or starting off at the non-default level without a flag, is<=
br>
&gt;&gt; a Gricean misdemeanor.<br>
&gt;&gt;<br>
&gt;&gt; What the default level is for a given word varies from word to wor=
d:<br>
&gt;&gt; &quot;lion&quot; takes sort of midlevel gross physical objects, &q=
uot;letter&quot; takes<br>
&gt;&gt; a highly abstracted level (there are twenty-six letters in the Eng=
lish<br>
&gt;&gt; alphabet). =A0Other words probably take lower levels, Buddhist tec=
hnical<br>
&gt;&gt; terms for components of a person probably somewhere around the bot=
tom.<br>
&gt;&gt; And, as the last example indicates, each level can be expressed in=
<br>
&gt;&gt; a number of ways.<br>
&gt;&gt;<br>
&gt;&gt; As far as I can figure out, the recent discussion on the {zo&#39;e=
} thread<br>
&gt;&gt; (or at least one or two of those discussions) hinges on whether we=
<br>
&gt;&gt; have the same fluidity of levels in Lojban and whether certain mov=
es<br>
&gt;&gt; constitute misdemeanor violation level shifting. =A0That is, what<=
br>
&gt;&gt; brodas? =A0Or, perhaps more precisely, what brodas in what way?<br=
>
&gt;&gt; A single thing may broda individually; a bunch may do so collectiv=
ely,<br>
&gt;&gt; or conjunctively, or disjunctively, or statistically, or in many m=
ore<br>
&gt;&gt; complex ways. =A0Also involved is the nature of some levels: are k=
inds<br>
&gt;&gt; just bunches of things or are the intensional objects of some sort=
?<br>
&gt;&gt; Are segments parts of objects or independent things to which objec=
ts<br>
&gt;&gt; may be related in a way analogous to the way kinds are related to<=
br>
&gt;&gt; objects? =A0In general, no side has been very clear (at least in<b=
r>
&gt;&gt; a single continuous statement) on any of these issues, making the<=
br>
&gt;&gt; whole rather difficult to follow, let alone to critique. =A0Hopefu=
lly,<br>
&gt;&gt; this will change.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; OK then. I&#39;ll reiterate, with all the clarity I can muster.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; Short version: {su&#39;o cinfo cu broda} has to mean that some actual =
lion<br>
&gt; brodas. Otherwise we have problems. This is largely independent of the=
<br>
&gt; meaning of {lo cinfo cu broda}, but not of the explanation of that<br>
&gt; meaning.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; Long version:<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; The basic problem as I&#39;m seeing it: if we don&#39;t specify levels=
, then we<br>
&gt; don&#39;t really specify quantifier scope.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; What I mean by this (i.e. by &quot;really&quot;): if B hears A say {su=
&#39;o ctuca cu<br>
&gt; tavla ro le tadni}, and B wants to understand what A means to say abou=
t<br>
&gt; actual teachers and actual students, and if {ctuca} and {tadni} do not=
<br>
&gt; specify levels, then B has to guess which levels A intends them to ref=
er<br>
&gt; to. If, for example, B guesses that A is talking about kinds of teache=
r<br>
&gt; and about actual students, all B can deduce about actual teachers and<=
br>
&gt; students is that every student was talked to by some teacher.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; (Here I&#39;m using &#39;actual&#39; in opposition to &#39;kind&#39; -=
 I wish we had<br>
&gt; a better word for it)<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; (I should also clarify that when I say &quot;{ctuca} does not specify<=
br>
&gt; a level&quot;, I mean that there are *individuals* which are e.g. kind=
s of<br>
&gt; teachers and which ctuca; if a kind were implemented as being merely<b=
r>
&gt; a bunch of actual teachers, we wouldn&#39;t have the problems I&#39;m =
talking<br>
&gt; about.)<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; So I conclude that it is not befitting of a logical language for it to=
<br>
&gt; have no means to specify level - where &#39;level&#39; refers to whate=
ver it is<br>
&gt; that crossing causes these quantifier scope shifts.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; This does not mean that I think lojban should only be able to discuss<=
br>
&gt; actual teachers and not kinds of teachers - merely that we need to be<=
br>
&gt; able to distinguish between the two.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; I further note that xorlo - or rather, my understanding of xorxes&#39;=
<br>
&gt; understanding of xorlo - makes this issue less academic than it might<=
br>
&gt; otherwise be. That&#39;s because it has descriptions, e.g. {lo ctuca},=
<br>
&gt; habitually (though not always) referring to (bunches of) corresponding=
<br>
&gt; kinds, e.g. to the kind Teacher.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; So under xorxes&#39; xorlo, kinds are not rare things summoned up only=
 when<br>
&gt; we specifically want to talk about them - you have to deal with them i=
f<br>
&gt; you want to understand any sentence using a gadri.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; (Here I&#39;m using &quot;the kind Teacher&quot; to refer to the whate=
ver-it-is that<br>
&gt; xorxes habitually refers to with {lo ctuca}; I have so far failed to<b=
r>
&gt; understand what this is, but it seems that whatever it is is a level u=
p<br>
&gt; from actual teachers as regards quantifier scope ambiguities, and that=
&#39;s<br>
&gt; all we need to know about it for the present discussion)<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; This leaves the question of how to deal with this problem; we have<br>
&gt; various partial answers, but perhaps I shouldn&#39;t complicate this t=
hread<br>
&gt; by discussing them here.<br>
&gt;<br>
&gt; Martin<br>
<br>
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