Re: lo'edu'u

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

We are quickly heading for a solomontean solution to lo'e . Before we 
get there though:

1. If there is no constraint on any squinting of lo'e being done in a 
way *representative* of the population, but is wholly at the discretion 
of the speaker, nothing stops them from making a singularisation like 
"take only the Americans I've actually met, and exaggerate all their 
traits I dislike". In effect, lo'e merko can mean the same thing as 
le'e merko in the right context.

On his current gap-filling bender :-) , And would rejoice in this, 
since that is in fact his understanding of le vs. lo in general: that 
le, being specific, is a particular instance of lo.

Two retorts. One, the definition has been 'typical' vs. 
'stereotypical'. People regard these as disjoint, rather than le'e a 
subclass of lo'e. (And enough people have made this complaint that it 
is, IMO, the majority understanding of the issue, which any eventual 
solution must encompass.)

Two, le isn't just +specific, it's also -veridical. I think this is 
being ignored wrongly. le is not truly a subclass of lo.

2. And pleads for Trobriander logicians, and why should anything we say 
about {lo'e gerko} = Mr Dog be based on individuals, rather than 
allowing Mr Dog to be the basic concept.

I say this is bogus. Lojban propagandises about minimising metaphysical 
constraints, but the whole point of the Loglan exercise has been to 
insert a *humungous* metaphysical constraint in the works: the 
machinery of Western logic. That's why we have masses and sets, and 
most languages don't. Anyone speaking Lojban has to deal with what an 
indivudual, a mass, and a set are. If the Trobrianders can come up with 
a logic that admits of Mr Dog but still has sensible things to say 
about masses and sets, fine. But since Western predicate logic *is* 
based on the individuals (there are only entities and predicates in 
model-theoretic semantics), I don't think we have anything to apologise 
for here.

Don't listen to the propaganda. Lojban has a huge cultural biases 
squarely embedded in it, on purpose. It just claims to minimise the 
rest. (And JCB, as pc has reported, probably naively thought that 
Western logic was objective and unbiased and didn't really force a 
particular way of doing things anyway, because its premisses are 
"self-evident". Yeah, self-evident to Westerners, because of a neat 
chicken-and-egg effect: Classical notions of logic do underly how 
Westerners regard the universe.)

3. http://www.herald-sun.com/ncmls/

> The original habitat of red wolves included forests, wetlands, 
> mountains and coastal prairies, throughout the southeastern United 
> States from Pennsylvania to Florida and as far west as Texas. Dens are 
> often located in hollow trees, stream banks and sand knolls. Today, 
> more than two-thirds of red wolves live in captivity at zoos, nature 
> centers and museums. Nearly all of them that live in the wild now live 
> in Eastern North Carolina, at the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes 
> National Wildlife Refuges.

Gedanken to make sure I follow:

The prototypical Red Wolf lives in the wilds of the South (because 
that's where he 'ought' to live.)
The typical Red Wolf lives in a zoo.
In the solomontean solution, {lo'e xunre labno} might be said to live 
in either, but presumably will by default live in the wilds of the South

4. The solomontean solution effectively wants a cmavo to attach to the 
gadri, qualifying its epistemology. Since this is impossible, let us at 
least insist that if this comes to pass (and I'm not a massive fan 
right now), it attach to the sumti rather than the selbri --- since the 
selbri is innocent of whatever people get up to when squinting. That 
means not {lo'e merko be ma'e lesi'o cmacrnaveradja}, but {lo'e merko 
NE ma'e lesi'o cmacrnaveradja}

-------------------- 
=================================----------------------
Dr Nick Nicholas. Unimelb, Aus. nickn@unimelb.edu.au; 
www.opoudjis.net
"Electronic editors have to live in hope: hope that the long-awaited
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they
will be workable; hope that software will appear to handle these texts;
hope that all the scholars of the world will have computers which can
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yet been devised). To hope for all this requires a considerable belief 
in
the inevitability of progress and in the essential goodness of mankind."
(Peter M.W. 
Robinson)