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RE: Re: lo'edu'u

Message: 8

I preface this by saying that the week of lojbaning I've just had has cost me a lot of sleep and a lot of anguish ("were you really put on this earth to do this instead of historical linguistics"), so I'll be brief.

Date: Sat, 7 Dec 2002 23:44:05 -0000
From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>
Subject: RE: Re: lo'edu'u

xod:
It seems that if one squints at Americans and only sees one girl, that's
e-gadri and not o-gadri. We're avoiding some bloody arguments about the
requirements of objectivity; it's been amusing to watch people dance
around the minefield with words like "veridical", and others get it flat
out wrong by applying strict standards for e-gadri

Yeah. Look, lo means what we say it means, and so does lo'e, and in that of course Wittgenstein was right: meaning is use. But I'm going more and more structuralist, which means that to me, the meaning of {lo'e} is decided by the meaning of {lo}. When you say {lo merko}, you claim some objective knowledge of the membership of {American}. The same should hold when you say {lo'e merko}: one should not be intrinsically more subjective than the other. People can make erroneous generalisations about what {lo'e merko} is, based on a small sample size; then again, people can be wrong about the membership of {American} too. Namely, if you say {lo'e merko cu mebli nixli}, then it is licit for me to correct you; if you say {le'e merko cu melbi nixli}, well, that's your cultural judgement, and de gustibus non disputandum,

What is a typical American is, the way I see it, an agglomeration of the properties held by most Americans, objectively. That means global squinting. "But noone knows all Americans, surely". True; and I never said people will always be correct in their lo'e claims, or even ultimately there is such a thing as correctness.

But I'm with Jordan: you may be involuntarily locally squinting, but surely you are thinking you are globally squinting: surely you are thinking you are saying something characteristic of most Americans, when you say {lo'e merko cu mebli nixli}.

The argument of metaphysical constraints is bogus too. {lo} claims omniscience: it claims you can make a yes/no determination among all things in the universe about what belongs amongst the denotation of the word. Yes, such omniscience is bogus; but it's still something we need to be claim, because there's lots of stuff in the world we *can* tell whether they're American or not. If it's ok with Lojban to say {lo merko}, necessitating a global knowledge of Americanhood, it should be ok to say {lo'e merko}, necessitating a global squinting of Americanhood,

There's an out here: you can say stuff about {lo merko} without needing to know every single American, because you use the sense of the word rather than its denotation --- the definition, rather than the enumeration ("An American is defined as..."). But I currently don't think this extends to {lo'e}. I think lo'e is meaningless without a notion of surveying: a reasonable sense of what the actual population does, not just a definition.

And yes, that means a lot of what will be said with lo'e is intrinsically bogus, and subjective opinion masquerading as objective fact, and people will be naughty for saying it. But I cannot go from that to saying "people are making subjective claims when they say {lo'e}, *and they know it*". That's just po-mo'ing {lo'e} away.

To weasel: people may differ in how they squint, I suppose, but anyone seeing Liv Tyler when they squint at {lo'e merko} is, I submit, not really getting the point of {lo'e}. And as Adam said, they can legitimately be corrected; they can't with {le'e}.

I will really understand what Nick means about lo'e as soon he relates it
to jboske post 511

for people's convenience, here is msg 511 (sent by xod):

On Thu, 24 Oct 2002, John Cowan wrote:

Jorge Llambias scripsit:

Suppose you tell me "I need a box to put these books in.
Please get me one."

mi nitcu pa le tanxe selcmi poi seltisna lei cukta

I would say: {mi nitcu lo'e tanxe lo nu setca
lei vi cukta ty i e'o ko cpagau mi ty}.


I don't know how to supply you with the typical box, any more than I
can capture the typical lion. That is, mi kavbu lo'e cinfo is false,
and by the same token mi cpacu lo'e tanxe is false too.

On this, I'm with John. This is no surprise given the party lines and personalities :-) , but I think it is also consistent with the story I've told.

When I squint away the differences between box, one thing they obviously can not have in common, or even have a preponderance of, is colour.

So:
.i xu su'o da zo'u da skari su'o tanxe .i go'i
.i xu su'o da zo'u da skari so'a tanxe .i na go'i
.i xu su'o da zo'u da skari lo'e tanxe .i na'i go'i

'Typical box' is a phantom; and it cannot have a colour.

Jorge's intensional box is also a phantom; but unlike the 'typical box', there is an expectation that it will be instantiated by a real box (you'll eventually find one); and that box will have a colour:

.i mi nitcu lo'ei tanxe
.i xu su'o da zo'u da skari ri
.i go'i fa da kaunai

The "fill in a blank here" box does have a colour; it's just unspecified and uninstantiated. There's no na'i about it. The typical box does not have a colour.

It occurs to me that some confusion may be caused by taking "lo'e cinfo"
to mean not "the typical lion" but "a typical lion", that is an actual
lion which closely resembles in relevant ways the abstract typical lion.
Jorge is referring to the statistical mode (sort of like a lion of the
type that is a numerical plurality), and John is referring something more
like the statistical average (an abstract entity, like a set). I think the
CLL defines lo'e as the latter; the former could be le fadni cinfo.

And, I think that statement is bogus. The intensional lion statement can be satisfied by the most atypical of lions; if you tame lions, and the first lion you tame is Persian, as old as Methuselah, dyed purple and a vegetarian, the statement will still be true. I don't see what mode or average have to do with it. lo'e cinfo as I understand it is as abstract as The Average Lion; but its properties are those held by modes, not averages. lo'e cinfo does not have 1.3 children; if the mode is 7, you can presumably say it has 7 children, although I'd be more comfortable with, say 7 +/- 2. But lo'e cinfo is no less abstract than The Average Lion with 1.3 children.

###
ki egeire arga ta sthqia ta qlimmena;#Nick Nicholas, French/Italian
san ahdoni pou se nuxtia anoijiata # University of Melbourne
thn wra pou kelahda epnixth, wimena! # nickn@unimelb.edu.au
stis murwdies kai st' anqismena bata.# http://www.opoudjis.net
-- N. Kazantzakhs, Tertsines: Xristos#