No. I think it should mean exactly three. The difference is = that I think "exactly three" should only be considered within con= text. If we're talking about the house next door, and I say {ci prenu} = =3D {ci da poi prenu}, it should mean that there are exactly three people i= n the context of the house next door, not that there are exactly three peop= le, in the whole of time and space, real and imagined, etc..., whatever the= scope of "universe of discourse" is.

This answer isn't really {na go'i} so= much as {na'i}. I was saying to choose a fixed universe of discourse, = then decide what an outer quantifier means. In other words I wanted to simp= lify the issue of outer quantifiers by decoupling it from the issue of dete= rmining the universe of discourse. You're saying that the universe of d= iscourse shrinks and expands rapidly from sentence to sentence, and that th= e idea of holding one constant isn't reasonable. I think this is troubl= ing in general, partly because everything done in logic depends on a backgr= ound universe of discourse. In other words the first thing you do is say wh= at you're talking about precisely (for example, the real number system)= , and then you start saying things about it. Rejecting this idea is sa'= u illogical, but not necessarily irrational nor necessarily damaging.

=A0
My problem with making the "verbosity and precision correlate tightly&= quot; doctrine into law is that precise statements all vanish for being too= verbose. It's like pedantic English, you can be very careful in Englis= h if you try really hard, but we don't speak that way, and those that t= ry are criticized for sounding awkward.

I'm not sure that's true, and I'm not certain th= at's really much of a problem if it is. I highly doubt that requiring m= ore words to be more precise- which, by the way, is already true in the vas= t majority of Lojban as it is- automatically makes higher precision stateme= nts cease to be made.

I phrased that the way I phrased it for a reason. <= i>Insisting that verbosity and precision correlate tightly makes it so = every precise statement is necessarily verbose. I think part of the point o= f Lojban is that logic cleanly and succinctly expresses certain ideas (quan= tifiers, for example, and in particular ro, su'o, and to a lesser exten= t pa), and by reworking ordinary language carefully we can bring everyday i= deas into that structure.

I als= o don't think your comparison with English is very on the ball, but tha= t's neither here nor there.

It's an exaggeration, but I think the bas= ic point is valid. That is, once you get to a certain level of verbosity, y= our listener tunes out. The threshold is probably higher in Lojban because = the grammar is both simpler and less obtrusive, but it's still there. <= br>
mi'e la latro'a mu'o