Re: [jboske] group loi rejected

[John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>]

Nick Nicholas scripsit:

> God. Not more. And, I have to hold a red card up here. If I say 
> "doesn't CLL-loi do job X here", it is not legitimate to answer "but 
> CLL-loi is wrong, because it doesn't capture English groups." I'm not 
> talking about English groups. I'm talking about CLL-loi.

I agree with this in principle, but I deny that CLL requires us to believe
that Yoko Ono married the Beatles. CLL 6.3:

# A mass has the properties
# of each individual which composes it, and may have other properties of
# its own as well. This can lead to apparent contradictions. Thus
# suppose in the piano-moving example above that person 1 has fair skin,
# whereas person 2 has dark skin. Then it is correct to say that the
# person-mass has both fair skin and dark skin. Using the mass
# descriptor ``lei'' signals that ordinary logical reasoning is not
# applicable: contradictions can be maintained, and all sorts of other
# peculiarities may exist. However, we can safely say that a mass
# inherits only the component properties that are relevant to it; it
# would be ludicrous to say that a mass of two persons is of molecular
# dimensions, simply because some of the parts (namely, the molecules)
# of the persons are that small.

Being married to Yoko is a property relevant to John only, not to the Fab Four.
(John's being married to Yoko was highly relevant to them, to be sure. :-) )

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