Message-ID: <34A02458.1C9B@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 23 Dec 1997 15:51:36 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: xor questions Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1963 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Dec 23 15:51:36 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - la lojbab. pupu cusku di'e > >>ma du lu'a lo tcati onai lo ckafi lu'u poi se vasru le patxu > >>what is the identity of [tea XOR coffee] which is contained in the pot. la xorxes. pu cusku di'e > >As with all other tries, {lo glare} is a true and unhelpful answer. > >(Or probably {lo lenku} by now.) Any question with {ma} will suffer > >from this, I suspect. la lojbab. cusku di'e > Why is either lo glare or lo lenku valid there. I have asked for a member > of the set or at leats something identical to a member of the set. maybe I > need to play around with "me" or "cmima" or even "pamei" if we want to > formally restrict ourselves to members of a specific set. But I don't see > how "lo glare" is a member of a set that does not specifically include "lo > glare" in its membership. Because "du" is object identity: it claims that its sumti refer to the same object. When you say "ma du X" then any sumti that co-references X is a correct answer, even if unhelpful because of its over-generality. For example, if you ask me "Is it Cicero or Caesar who is the author of the First Oration Against Catiline?" then I may truthfully reply "Tully", because Cicero is Tully (that is, the names "Cicero" and "Tully" co-refer), even if you don't know that. With equal truth, and even greater unhelpfulness, I may reply "A Roman" or "A man" or "An object", since Cicero is all these things: it is correct to assert that a Roman is a member of the set {Cicero, Caesar}. The only way to avoid this problem is to move to a meta-level, asking about words rather then objects. In that case, the question becomes "What word from the set {"Cicero", "Caesar"} correctly names the author of the First Oration etc." Note that the members of the set here are words, not objects: it would not be correct to assert that "a Roman" was a member of the set {"Cicero", "Caesar"}. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban