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Date: Sat, 4 Mar 2000 05:03:53 EST
From: pycyn@aol.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] etc. = mass, apparently Addendum
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From: pycyn@aol.com

As near as I can make out, Mr Rabbit and gavagai (pretty clearly inspired by 
reports of the Trobrianders), however they may differ in surrounding 
rhetoric, are still extensionally identical, that is, a suitable way of 
dealing with one will work as well for the other (and surely that definition 
of gavagai is not Quine's, even he would avoid the ambiguity inherent in it 
or else expand to explain that whole rabbits and, indeed, several whole 
rabbits, count as well as pieces of one or several rabbits).  Of course, 
since both of them have been shrouded in thoroughly obfuscating -- or, more 
likely, just thoroughly confused -- discussion over the last several decades, 
I may well be wrong about that.  The Trobrianders have not been allowed to 
speak for themselves and Malinowski was not a very clear thinker in this 
metaphysics of language game.  Quine is the guy who wrote a stirring 
justification for a nice move in logic and has ever since gone around 
claiming that the  article had refuted the position it justified. And JCB 
used his miscegenate of the two as his first answer for every problem that 
came his way over the years, so long as it involved sumti.  But, if they are 
not the same, then I have to had yet another kind of mass still moldering in 
Lojban and see whether it too already has a solution there.  I suspect it 
does.
pc

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