From lojban+bncCOTEtqyUDhDDt9TyBBoEIc_57Q@googlegroups.com Wed Aug 24 08:42:10 2011 Received: from mail-gw0-f61.google.com ([74.125.83.61]) by chain.digitalkingdom.org with esmtp (Exim 4.72) (envelope-from ) id 1QwFae-0001wq-PW; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:42:09 -0700 Received: by gwb11 with SMTP id 11sf1831533gwb.16 for ; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:57 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=googlegroups.com; s=beta; h=x-beenthere:received-spf:date:from:to:subject:message-id:references :mime-version:content-type:content-disposition:in-reply-to:x-pgp-key :x-pgp-keyid:x-cunselcu'a-valsi:user-agent:x-original-sender :x-original-authentication-results:reply-to:precedence:mailing-list :list-id:x-google-group-id:list-post:list-help:list-archive:sender :list-subscribe:list-unsubscribe; bh=RTrRTs4ynlixhwrPNzJI93CstroLGNniGvjuARVvd68=; b=DZaq+TCj/Tt/lrq1ZGCGr6xb5Kjjw5syDQhwl/hV/L37oCw53yw0p7hiNdzIAHLYBp d61kOs91r3KEPrcj1g6/jflwR5xazNFeXUcojitluYJ4OKma9/jxFtvc9XNOMihWxuS0 Myhq2Mtjk0fTHEr+CTkViAaOyonEXUcjH4toQ= Received: by 10.150.114.14 with SMTP id m14mr418290ybc.55.1314200515179; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:55 -0700 (PDT) X-BeenThere: lojban@googlegroups.com Received: by 10.231.8.144 with SMTP id h16ls6559289ibh.1.gmail; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.42.115.67 with SMTP id j3mr742955icq.33.1314200514153; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.42.115.67 with SMTP id j3mr742954icq.33.1314200514138; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:54 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sdf.lonestar.org (mx.sdf.org [192.94.73.19]) by gmr-mx.google.com with ESMTPS id ll18si4092204pbb.0.2011.08.24.08.41.53 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=OTHER); Wed, 24 Aug 2011 08:41:53 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of mbays@sdf.org designates 192.94.73.19 as permitted sender) client-ip=192.94.73.19; Received: from gonzales.homelinux.org (root@sverige.freeshell.org [192.94.73.4]) by sdf.lonestar.org (8.14.4/8.14.3) with ESMTP id p7OFfqKI023239 for ; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:41:52 GMT Received: from martin by gonzales.homelinux.org with local (Exim 4.75) (envelope-from ) id 1QwFaR-0008PB-Ll for lojban@googlegroups.com; Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:41:51 +0200 Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2011 17:41:51 +0200 From: Martin Bays To: lojban@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses Message-ID: <20110824154151.GA3105@gonzales> References: <20110819100840.GA27065@SDF.ORG> <20110820105209.GD25668@SDF.ORG> <20110820195330.GB19624@SDF.ORG> <20110822102301.GA24775@SDF.ORG> <20110823230437.GC19213@gonzales> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: multipart/signed; micalg=pgp-sha1; protocol="application/pgp-signature"; boundary="IJpNTDwzlM2Ie8A6" Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: X-PGP-Key: http://mbays.freeshell.org/pubkey.asc X-PGP-KeyId: B5FB2CD6 X-cunselcu'a-valsi: farna User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.21 (2010-09-15) X-Original-Sender: mbays@sdf.org X-Original-Authentication-Results: gmr-mx.google.com; spf=pass (google.com: best guess record for domain of mbays@sdf.org designates 192.94.73.19 as permitted sender) smtp.mail=mbays@sdf.org Reply-To: lojban@googlegroups.com Precedence: list Mailing-list: list lojban@googlegroups.com; contact lojban+owners@googlegroups.com List-ID: X-Google-Group-Id: 1004133512417 List-Post: , List-Help: , List-Archive: Sender: lojban@googlegroups.com List-Subscribe: , List-Unsubscribe: , --IJpNTDwzlM2Ie8A6 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable * Tuesday, 2011-08-23 at 22:04 -0300 - Jorge Llamb=EDas : > On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Martin Bays wrote: > > > > You seem to want contextually dependent atoms; do you correspondingly > > want contextually dependent individuals? (see also below) >=20 > Yes, what counts as a member of the domain of discourse has to be part > of the context. If that's all you mean, then fine. I was implicitly working under the simplifying assumption of a fixed domain of discourse. Given your example below, I think you mean a bit more than that - but I think it's still fine (see below). > > For whatever record, I feel I should point out that I'm not actually yet > > convinced that introducing plural reference (/Wholes) was ever a good > > idea, i.e. an improvement on having always-distributive predicates with > > groups-as-individuals to substitute for collective predication. Do you > > have any killer argument for that? >=20 > If we want to be able to say things like "they were wearing red caps > while surrounding the building", then either there's non-distributive > predication over "them", or "they" is a very weird many-headed > individual. If you allow this kind of individual into the domain of > discourse, how do you count the cap-wearers? Are there n, with n being > the number of people, or is there a much larger number of cap-wearers, > including the largest one that surrounds the building? >=20 > The alternative is to make saying things like the above impossible, > and having to always say something like "each of them was wearing a > red cap while 'the group having each of them and nobody else as a > member' surrounded the building", presumably with some shortcut form > for all that mouthful (like "lo'u"). But you would need to split it > into two sentences, you couldn't have two such predicates sharing the > same argument. Yes. I'm not convinced by this argument - I would be happy to sacrifice brevity for simpler semantics. But actually, having thought about it, I don't see a wholly satisfactory alternative to plural predication. I can't see a way to use distributive predication and groups-as-individuals which doesn't end up being either painfully less expressive or more conceptually complicated. > Groups as individuals are still fine in many contexts, and sometiimes > we do want to count groups, but not in every context. Sometimes we > don't want to say anything about a group but still want to say things > about its members non-distributively. >=20 > >> > How, without invoking absolute atoms, can you give a meaning to > >> > {ro ko'a broda} based only on the Whole [ko'a] and on the meaning of > >> > {broda}? > >> > >> I agree that we end up invoking atoms, but maybe we mean different > >> things by "absolute atoms". In some (many) contexts the atoms will be > >> people, in other contexts they may be human scale "dacti", and so on. > >> And these atoms can change from sentence to sentence, and perhaps even > >> from reference to reference in the same sentence. What we probably > >> don't need is context independent absolute atoms. Once we have settled > >> on an interpretation, then we do have absolute atoms for that > >> interpretation, but there's no guarantee that the next sentence won't > >> bring up the need to reassess what the "absolute" atoms are. > > > > I don't see that this presents a problem for the "absolute atom" > > approach. > > > > It does if the 'part of' (aka 'among') relation is considered to have > > anything to do with the world model, e.g. a limb being part of its owner > > or a drop being part of an ocean, so perhaps the mereological > > terminology is misleading. I'll switch to plural reference, where the > > question is whether we can have a context-independent notion of > > individual. (To be clear: here I am understanding 'plural reference' and > > 'individual' to mean that any term is interpreted as having > > a referent-set which is a set of individuals.) >=20 > For me the strongest argument for context dependent individuals comes > not so much from all this distributivity issue but from kinds/generic > reference (bare plurals in English). Right. I've avoided mentioning these things, not wanting to take too much mud with the water sample, but since you bring them up... I don't think generics can be treated as individuals on par with the other individuals in our universe. Indeed, we would then have to have {lo'e mulna'u cu du da poi namcu}. But since generics are generic, we would also have {ro da poi mulna'u zo'u lo'e namcu cu na du da}, a contradiction. So I don't see that {lo broda} can be interpreted as a generic while=20 holding on to the idea that the interpretation of {lo broda} is determined by its set of referents. I think {lo'e broda} has to be read as introducing a quantifier: {lo'e broda cu brode} -> "for x a generic broda: brode(x)" (the semantics of this quantifier being hazy and context-dependent). Note also that two such quantifiers generally won't commute (e.g. for generic natural numbers n: for generic natural numbers m: n > Now prenu and dacti and nu broda and so on are all individuals. So {lo > > broda} can have any of them as referents, as long as they broda; which > > of them it does is of course context-dependent. > > > > So in other words: I don't see why the reassessment you mention can't > > just be of what the referents of this next instance of {lo broda} should > > be, rather than of what counts as an individual. >=20 > What counts as an individual letter in "there are five letters in the > word 'letter'" is not the same as what counts as an individual letter > in "there are 26 letters in the English alphabet", agreed? Either "e" > and "e" are sometimes one letter and sometimes two letters, but they > are always letters, or they are one letter_1 and two letter_2 and a > predicate such as "is a letter" is ambiguous. Maybe you prefer this > view, what counts as an individual is always fixed, but it is the > meaning of predicates such as "is a letter" that changes with context. Yes. That's an ambiguous predicate, and context disambiguates. I don't think we have an actual disagreement here, beyond terminology - unless you would want to allow a Lojbanic equivalent of "There are six letters in 'letter', but 26 of them in the English alphabet". But I doubt you do. (Not rendering into Lojban, because I wouldn't actually want to use lerfu for the first meaning, as opposed to {lerfu nilcla} or similar... but that's irrelevant - selbri necessarily are quite ambiguous in general, and of course context helps disambiguate) --IJpNTDwzlM2Ie8A6 Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.17 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAk5VG78ACgkQULC7OLX7LNauRgCfdomM2NMG3MnfIPrYt4qCFsyE VscAnR+abpxixNk8O1uPNF5dPDhG7zHZ =eFu2 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --IJpNTDwzlM2Ie8A6--