From jimc@math.ucla.edu Mon May 16 11:49:07 1994 Message-Id: <9405161621.AA20698@molly.math.ucla.edu> To: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: "Only" (again) - comments needed so I don't make a fool of myself In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 15 May 94 06:56:42 EDT." <9405151100.AA07570@julia.math.ucla.edu> Date: Mon, 16 May 94 09:21:37 -0700 From: jimc@math.ucla.edu Status: RO > le da'apamei po'u na'ebo la mardj citka lo jintitnanba > The all-but-one-some which is other-than Marge eat/ate doughnut(s). Very interesting discussion, and I'm happy to see "only" getting reviewed, and also the suggestion that "just" should be dealt with too by an authority. For me, those two words were very slippery. >From the gismu list dated 12/07/93, N-mei means, X1 is a mass with underlying set X2 and members X3. I can easily accept le te da'apamei po'u na'ebo la mardj... i.e. members in extension with Marge restricted out. When the predicate is eating donuts, the eaters do it in extension. Clearly this is wrong: le se da'apamei po'u na'ebo la mardj... i.e. the set which is not Marge. I think le (-) da'apamei po'u na'ebo la mardj... is closer to the set version. Certainly the eaters are still doing it individually, but { (X) po'u na'ebo la mardj } can't mean anything other than "(X) restricted to not be Marge". Maybe it's an ant colony which has latched onto Marge's donut. The point is, (X) and Marge are in the same semantic category, and are potentially identical. Think of the underlying sets; clearly it's bogus (Russell's paradox) to restrict a set so as to take a subset which is not equal to a designated member. A possible reply is, the "value" of a mass is its members in extension (in which case the restriction is OK), with an implied restriction that the members form a set-with-structure, which is the mass. This solution certainly takes care of the semantic conflict, that whatever the mass (of donut eaters) is doing, the donuts are being eaten by members in extension. But to me, this way out seems like cheating, in that you ought to be able to talk about the mass as a unit, separate from the members and from the underlying set, and if the mass necessarily slithers off into crumbs of members, you can't talk about it at all. In any case, you can expect some comments about massification from Horn. I've found this method to be useful: arguments have values which are sets (of referents), and predicates are set-valued functions (in this example, intersection with the complement of Marge). This approach is much more resistant to the siren song of "common sense"; if the result is in extension when you think it ought to be packed up in a unit, then you know there's an error somewhere, whereas once having decided that extension is the right value, you know that you can't go back to the unit, without additional verbiage. -- jimc