From LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Sat Mar 6 22:46:00 2010 Reply-To: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Sender: Lojban list Date: Thu Dec 7 13:40:07 1995 From: Jim Carter Subject: Re: PLI: a triviality X-To: lojban@cuvmb.columbia.edu To: John Cowan In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 06 Dec 95 20:09:29 EST." <9512070110.AA23692@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: OR X-From-Space-Date: Thu Dec 7 13:40:07 1995 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@UBVM.CC.BUFFALO.EDU Message-ID: On Wed. 6 Dec 1995 Jorge Llambias wrote: > The difference between {le} and {lo}, as I understand it, is this: > > le broda = each of the broda that I'm talking about. > lo broda = at least one of all the broda that there are. > .... > (Others view it somewhat differently, giving more importance to > veridicality.) As I understand it, your definitions of {le} and {lo} are orthodox. But also, you actually affirmed pc's position about veridicality! "All the broda's that there are" means that each of the candidate referents (from which certain ones are selected) is truly a broda. In contrast, with {le} the salient feature is that you're talking about it. It's customary for the referent to really be a broda -- if you want your listeners not to get lost in a thicket of deep metaphors -- but not essential. For example in intemperate descriptions one often says "the bastard", and it's obvious who the referent is, but without any veridical involvement of the marital status of the referent's mother. I believe Steve Hazel's original question was not trivial -- the exact definition of the various 's is a foundation of the language and is the topic of a tech harangue at least twice a year. A confusing aspect of these tech harangues is the appearance of the word "claim", as in "a veridical sumti makes a claim about its referents". When I see "claim" I think of an implicit subphrase stuck on the sumti: {noi ke'a broda} = "and by the way, that referent really is a broda". Other formulations use "the referent exists in reality" for the implicit phrase. I wish these implicit subphrases would go away for the following reasons: 1. The point of the containing bridi is to express the relation of its selbri among the given arguments. Adding mandatory implicit baggage obscures the speaker's intent. Particularly if different people specify different baggages. 2. With {lo}, referents being broda is implicit in the definition of {lo}, not as a separate claim, and so no additional implicit phrase for that is needed. 3. Peculiar interpretations can arise if a referent set turns out to be empty. It's customary for speakers to specify nonempty referent sets, but Lojban is supposed to be a "logical language", and I think its users should know enough logic to deal with empty sets when they arise. In other words, I don't like a mandatory implicit subphrase saying "at least one referent exists in reality", whatever can of worms "reality" is. However on the last point, {lo} has an implicit outside quantifier of {su'o} (at least [one]), giving rise to an implicit counting subphrase. Thus were the set of candidate broda's empty, any proposition including {lo broda} would end up false, without the intervention of unicorn-containing realities. The implicit subphrase about existence is replaced by an implicit phrase about how many candidates fit the s-bridi {broda}, which to my mind is logically and practically far more defensible. James F. Carter Voice 310 825 2897 FAX 310 206 6673 UCLA-Mathnet; 6115 MSA; 405 Hilgard Ave.; Los Angeles, CA, USA 90095-1555 Internet: jimc@math.ucla.edu (finger for PGP key) UUCP:...!{ucsd,ames,ncar,gatech,purdue,rutgers,decvax,uunet}!math.ucla.edu!jimc