Received: from uga.cc.uga.edu by nfs1.digex.net with SMTP id AA26810 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Wed, 7 Dec 1994 01:01:25 -0500 Message-Id: <199412070601.AA26810@nfs1.digex.net> Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU by uga.cc.uga.edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 5144; Wed, 07 Dec 94 00:59:46 EST Received: from UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@UGA) by UGA.CC.UGA.EDU (LMail V1.2a/1.8a) with BSMTP id 5229; Wed, 7 Dec 1994 00:59:20 -0500 Date: Tue, 6 Dec 1994 21:58:27 -0800 Reply-To: Gerald Koenig Sender: Lojban list From: Gerald Koenig Subject: Re: Cowan's sum opaque X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Bob LeChevalier Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Wed Dec 7 01:01:28 1994 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu djan quotes me, djer: >la djer. cusku di'e > >> John and others seem to agree that all the meaning in the English "any" >> can be captured by a universal quantifier or an attitude marker. > >Not at all. Sometimes "any" is existential, not universal. > >> I disagree. Consider this meaning from my Webster's: >> >> "1: one or some indiscriminately of whatever kind: >> 1a: one or another taken at random ." >> >> There are two anys here. One taken indiscriminately or some taken >> indiscriminately. I want to consider the case of one taken >> indiscriminately. It certainly cannot be expressed as "all". Neither is >> it an just an attitude. We're talking about quantification here, namely >> one something. > >Note, however, that the Webster example is an imperative! You wouldn't say >in English "I asked any man I met." You would say "I asked a man that I met" >(existential) or else "I asked every man that I met" (universal). djer: Trying to preserve the dictionary sense of "any" as: one taken randomly out of at least two, in a past tense; I would *not say, "I asked a man that I met" because this doesn't express the act of random choice which is built in to this definition. The man in your sentence could be Adam--well, at least the only man in the universe of discourse. So no choice would be possible. I would say "I asked someone at random that I met" to preserve this meaning of "any" in a past tense. Webster: someone: some person [note singular jlk] some: 1: one indeterminate quantity, part, or number as distinguished from the rest. There is no "rest" in your version. Although xorxes has said that the meaning of my "any" is close to his xe'e I want to use xe'o to clearly express: the random selection of exactly one thing from a set of at least two. xe'o then is neither an E(x) [there exists at least one] nor an All(x) [for all x]. Our troubles begin when we try to make "any" mean one or the other of these in order to shoehorn them into FOL and thence to lojban. That is why I advocate coining this new word, xe'o. New in that it has no exact equivalent in any language because it represents one and only one of the m-any faces of the English "any". And "cunpa lo su'o re" does the same thing, if user friendliness is no consideration. >The need for "any"s comes up when we have some kind of opaque context, >including an imperative; invariably (I claim) this involves a subordinated >abstraction clause. djer: I think "any" causes opacity by not ever pointing to a specific object, concrete or abstract. It's like trying to know the winner of the California lottery before the draw. Since the referent cannot be known until after the fact of selection, and then only if expressed, you are free to claim that it invariably involves a subordinate abstraction clause. Or at least until the referent is identified later. On this interpretion, "I saw someone playing pool" is also referentially opaque until the "someone" is explicitly identified. It claims only that one person was seen as distinguished from the rest. It doesn't claim to identify that person. The difference is the one that is so crucial in court. You can see I've changed my views 180 deg. concerning pycn's example. This is how I see it until convinced otherwise. djer >John Cowan sharing account for now > e'osai ko sarji la lojban. I did.