Re: gadri paradigm: 2 excellent proposals

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

On Sunday, Dec 22, 2002, at 14:27 Australia/Melbourne, Nick Nicholas 
wrote:

> I commend you guys for your premisses, and blast you for your 
> confusion.

I meant 'conclusion'. And in fact i won't think this was a propos 
anyway :-) , because I don't think you are confused anymore; we've got 
a coherent ontology out of you, which is great. The rest is politics, 
and in politics, I overtly proclaim my bias. I am willing to throw out 
some of CLL, but nowhere near as much as you're saying.

If we can all agree on the ontology, we can leave the remainder (which 
cmavo to which meaning) to the BPFK. We're not quite all on the same 
page on the ontology, but I'm hopeful we'll get there soon.

Oh, and And? Drawing a snake? I think some semanticists would call that 
an intensional snake, rather than a Kind of snake. Recall that in that 
paper I sent out the link to (and noone has been able to get time to 
look at :-) , four classes of intensional predicates were named:

want/need
seek
depict
evaluate (fear, worship)

If you can describe something that has never and will never exist, you 
could be constructing your own world, in which your referent does exist 
(xod's solution); or you could be talking about "Any-x such that x has 
these properties" (Jorge's solution). And, I take it you think drawing 
a snake is drawing the Kind of snake, depicting snake-nature. I think 
the intensional snake (x such that x has snakedom) is a better 
solution, because it's more general....

(... or maybe not. These singularisations --- prototype, kind, Any-x 
--- are very very very hard to keep apart. I think we're stuck with 
them, but yes, they will be a bear to teach.)

One more thing. the denotation of \lx.f(x), according to the egg-heads, 
*is* the set of x such that f(x). To them, the denotation of the word 
"cat" and the lambda expression \lx.cat(x) is the same: all cats. 
There's a reason they do that, to allow meaning to be compositionally 
built up by combining articles and nouns --- so the articles do the 
quantifier work.
And, in your most excellent scheme, everything starts with {lo'i 
mlatu} and is quantified from there by gadri.

But I wonder whether it would not be worthwhile to grant the 
equivalence {lo ka ce'u mlatu} = {lo'i mlatu}....

Nah, probably not, But you can see why the formal-semantic mainstream, 
as far as I can tell, would think that these two *are* equivalent 
(allowing the mid-sentence prenexes that are ungrammatical in Lojban):

mi sisku leka ce'u mlatu
mi sisku (to ro da poi mlatu zo'u: toi) da

== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing | le'o ko na rivbi fi'inai palci je tolvri 
danlu
opoudjis@opoudjis.net | -- Miguel Cervantes tr. Jorge 
LLambias