Can't keep away

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

Damn you all :-) . But I'll make no attempt to engage in discussion, 
while the mess of these threads is unresolved (or even while it isn't.) 
I'll just throw points out from time to time.

One, Jorge says {loi} must be collective, because it has an inner 
quantifier, and inner quantifiers are only compatible with individuals, 
and if a Lojban string is grammatical it must be meaningful. To the 
last, I say bullshit. That's a bogus assumption, particularly since any 
fundamentalist solution to these problems will use existing grammar. 
Let some strings be meaningless. Otherwise, we have to drop the whole 
grammar; and this is not going to happen. And honestly, if you were 
going to drop the whole grammar, why didn't you introduce mid-sentence 
prenexes instead of your intensional article anyway?

Two: Aside to the founders persisting in conflating substance and 
collective. If one man carries a piano, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. 
If two do separately, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. If two do so 
together, {loi nanmu cu bevri lo pipno}. A pox on you if you refuse to 
grant us a way of distinguishing the last two cases. A pox on you if 
you say "leave it to pragmatics"; then Lojban is no better than English 
(and the logic of this is straightforward, there is no need to leave it 
to pragmatics.) A pox on you if you think Lojban should make 
distinctions made in Timbuktu, but not even allow distinctions made in 
English. Even if you enforce loi as a conflation (which looks 
impossible to me right now, given the very different ontologies), we 
will have our Collective LAhE.

Three, I think I finally got an instance where And's Unique works. A 
pox on everyone here for not coming up earlier with examples that show 
how it works *in English* (and to hell with the Trobrianders; if we 
here now don't get it, how will we ever teach it, and how will anyone 
else ever get it?) (And did come up with some decent examples later on, 
but hasn't insisted on them. He should learn to: the Unique will never 
be sold on the basis of "All lions are one lion".)

That example is what started this whole sorry mess: I like chocolate.

Individuate chocolate howsoever you choose. Pieces, packets, whatever. 
What does it mean when you say {mi nelci LVV cakla}?

The Prototype of chocolate defines chocolate ahead of time as something 
you like. Bzzt.

The Mode of chocolate is probably just as unworkable, and you really 
don't want to get into counting types of choc in the world.

{rau lo cakla} isn't generic enough.

The Collective of chocolate means you can't like one in isolation, you 
have to like them all together. Which is bogus.

The Substance of Chocolate is very close, but even here, we get into 
implicit quantities. Not inner, because we admit substance has no 
individuals to quantify, by definition. But outer: should you be able 
to say you like half the substance? And what would that mean?

If we insist on Substance not Collective for {loi} (which I still think 
is the fundamentalist thing to do), we might work around that. But if 
we try Unique here instead, I think we're OK.

When you like Nick, you don't just like a bunch of avatars of Nick, or 
even most of them. You see an underlying individual behind all the 
avatars, and you like that.

When you like chocolate, you don't just like the individual pieces you 
eat. You like the individual behind all the pieces. That individual is 
pretty close to the prototype, but the prototype is a definition; the 
Kind, you can still find out about.

And And's Unique is a Kind. As in, chocolate is a kind of thing I like; 
or, I like that kind of chocolate: this takes the individuals belonging 
to the kind, and treats them as a single, indivisible thing. But it 
admits that the Kind has avatars, of individual pieces; whereas masses 
don't admit that.

And now I'm getting confused again, because that still sounds like 
masses (one piece chocolate?), so I'll leave it for someone else to run 
with.

###
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#