Message-Id: <m0sOKd1-0000YoC@xiron>
Date:         Wed, 21 Jun 1995 03:44:00 -0400
Reply-To:     Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Sender:       Lojban list <LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET>
From:         Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>
Subject:      Trobriand Island masses
To:           Veijo Vilva <veion@XIRON.PC.HELSINKI.FI>
Content-Length: 9382
Lines: 185

>> Sounds like Trobriand island masses
>
>This is where I got the idea.
>
>> i.e. Lojban "loi",
>
>I used to think this was so, but then we had a discussion about it on
>this list within the last year, & it turned out this isn't so.

That was another of those unresolved debates.  De jure, "loi" still
encompasses both Trobriand Island masses and porridgy masses.

Since I haven't read the literature, I can't pretend to argue
academically that they are the same.  JCB's concept of masses, as
communicated to others, was based on the Trobriand Island masses, but
his usage tended more towards the porridgy ones.  At one time, pc and I
were basically agreed that there was a commonalty between the two kinds
of masses that allowed them to be represented the same way.  But I'm not
a Trobriand islander, and I have trouble reconstructing mass concepts of
things I am used to thinking of as discretes.  I also have trouble going
the other way.  It is hard for me to think of a single molecule of water
as "water" in the way I know the concept, or to think that this molecule
has a meaningful definition as being a "gas" with "temperature" and
"pressure", even though I was reliably informed today that indeed all of
these things are the case.

If I could easily concieve of a myopic singular "water", I could perhaps
evaluate your argument more effectively.  But mass concepts ARE fuzzy,
if not porridgy.

Somewhere you talk about English's mass nouns and count nouns.

My understanding is that Trobriand Islanders have only mass nouns, and
the further, semantically they view individual components as inheriting
properties of the mass.  We English speakers tend to look at masses as
plurals backed into 1, but seldom losing sight of the plurality.  They
look at masses as a unity viewed from many different aspects, never
losing sight of the unity.  The understanding of the mass may be
different, but I think the same kind of massification is taking place.

The only mass concept I know of in English that seems to me like I
understand the Trobriand Island case is that of the traditional doctrine
of the Holy Trinity as a single God-mass.  Worshipers treat each aspect
as if it were the mass, having integral aspects with the othher aspects.
I suspect that if we were to examine the presumed inheritances of
properties of the 3 elements of the Trinity we might understand
Trobriand Island masses, and gain some insights into Lojban masses.  But
I don't know this subject well enough to analyze it to see if it holds
up - instinct tell me something similar is happening.

Anyone want to tackle this???  Bonus credit if you translate it into
Lojban, but I hope to see it in English so I have some hope of
understanding %^).  Hmmm.  Except for the Lord's Prayer and a chunk of
Genesis, we don't have much theological text in Lojban.  It would be a
worthy addition to the corpus, and then someone can tackle Aquinas (xo
{angels} ka'e dansu cpana lo pijne jipno).

>{loi} and {lei} are porridgifiers:  you add discrete ingredients & mash
>them up so their boundaries vanish - you end up with a porridgey blob.

I am not sure that the boundaries HAVE to vanish in order for it to be a
mass concept.  And in fact boundaries don't fully break down in all
cases.  "A company" that paints my house, but has exactly one person as
an employee, seems quite discrete to me.  We don't think of the painting
company as a collection of porridgey arms and legs flailing paint
brushes (at least I don't %^).  And I think that I COULD look at a
rabbit warren, and then a short time later seeing a rabbit clearly from
that warren, say that I see part of the mass of that warren, rather than
focussing on seeing an individual rabbit.  That is my take on Trobriand
Island masses - that they are metonymic rather than myopic singulars,
and have a lot in common with the White House that announced some new
policy or another yesterday.  Both can be views as porridgey masses or
as myopic singulars, though the myopic singular of the White House is
both a building and a President, which have little in common between
them.

>The idea is that whereas with porridgification you
>distinguish between individuals but ignore their boundaries and emblob
>them together, with myopic singularization you pretend that possibly
>different individuals are the same individual.

We similarly pretend that the "White House" today is the same individual
as it was during the Ronald Reagan years.

>> The bottom line question is what happens when you see 2 people.  Are
>> they two myopically singular humans?  If, per an example I used
>> elsewhere, you see only parts of their bodies sticking around a corner,
>> you cannot say "mi viska re lo'e remna".  I guess you could say "mi
>> viska loi re lo'e remna".
>
>{mi viska loe prenu} should mean there was a person-shaped image on my
>retina.  If I saw 2 people together, I'd say {mi viska loe prenu remei}.
>
>The conceptual difference is clear, but the logical difference isn't -
>as I said {loe} is {loi ro lo} (& {lee} I suppose is {lei ro}).  In
>consequence, I find it a bit hard to defend myopic singularity as
>necessary.  On the other hand, there is no decent competing meaning for
>{loe}/{lee}.

I think that pluralization of typicality is more complicated than you
have stated.  It is harder to say with only 2, but if I said "mi viska
lo'e prenu paki'omei" I would not have to be an ardent feminist, nor to
have a gender-specific context to question this if all 1000 turned out
to be males.  But if gender is not an issue in the context, I can easily
envision a politician saying "I shook hands with 1000 typical citizens
today" viewing them as independent singulars, even if there was a strong
disparity in genders.

Or maybe to make it simpler.  If I see one person and I say "mi viska
lo'e prenu" and a short while later I see a different person and can say
"mi viska lo'e prenu", I am not so myopic as to think I have only seen
one person.  But "mi viska re lo'e prenu" would be far more correct than
"mi viska lo'e prenu remei" because at no time were two people's images
on my retina.  Nor is there any suggestion of massification in this
context, since I clearly see the two people as individuals.

>> I therefore think of lo'e as a displayant of the ideal prototype
>> properties of the class.
>
>This I feel is a job for a selbri "x1 is a displayant of the ideal
>prototype properties of x2".

Well, you would need a place for the standard/person holding the ideal,
but I get your point.  But you could also then say that "le broda"
should be expressed using some predicate like "x1 is described by
speaker x2 for listener x3 as if it were a member of set x5" (I am not
trying for pedantic accuracy in this example).

In theory perhaps everything in Lojban can be reducable and should be
reducable to some canonical logical form.  But I will leave that to pc
and the logicians, and try instead to get a living language that
reflects what people really do with language, relying on logicians
primarily to tell me when something I do is contradictory to the logic
of natural language as thus far induced.

I am reasonably sure that Lojban has built into it the mechanisms for
logical discourse and try to leave it to the logicians to decide what
they are (minimize actual change in usage as a result of their
decision), whereas my main concerns of late have been to make sure that
it has the mechanisms for alogical and analogical discourse.  Masses and
typicals are perhaps subject to logical analysis if you introduce the
proper predicates, but I expect the usage to drive the predicate rather
than vice versa.  If you want true logical discourse, then phrase
everything in prenexes and daxitu'o.

>> >What are the properties of {zo'e}?  I thought it was that it could be
>> >equivalent to {da} or to {keha}; I didn't realize it had extra magic.
>> I have no idea what to make of equating "zo'e" to "ke'a" in the simple
>> sentence "zo'e blanu".
>
>That {zoe} can be +specific, or non-specific.

You mean "ko'a blanu"?

"ke'a blanu" outside of a relative clause has absolutely no meaning to
me specific or non-specific.  It is grammatical noise with potential
meaning, as perhaps an answer to the question "le palku poi ?mo".

Some of the extra magic comes from the fact that you can say "zo'e
klama zo'e zo'e zo'e zo'e zo'e" and all the "zo'e"s are understood to be
evaluated independently, and the fact that I used an x6 on klama poses
no semantic problem.

>> I guess a formal definition of a zo'e in the nth place of a predicate
>> broda is "le sexiny broda" or perhaps "da voi sexiny broda" if there is
>> any distinction from the previous, where "sexiny" is the conversion
>> operator (SE) for the nth place (yes it's legal to do that to SE).
>
>That sounds a bit daft to me, given the non-veridicality of le and
>voi.

Do you mean that you think that "zo'e" is veridical???  That sounds
*more than a bit* daft to me %^)

>> "pimudo" implies masses.
>
>Why? It seems like nonsense to me. All {pi} quantifers seem like
>nonsense to me. I've been following the recent discussion &
>have not spotted a good case for them.

They have a direct counterpart in English, with our mass concepts. e.g.
"I drank most of the water" "mi pinxe piso'e lei djacu" which I dare say
is not necessarily the same thing as saying "mi pinxe so'e le djacu".

lojbab