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More from pc Re: [jboske] Monty's Unicorns, Fermat version
From: Pycyn@aol.com
Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 20:05:04 EST
Subject: Re: [jboske] Monty's Unicorns, Fermat version
To: lojbab@lojban.org
Where does Fermat come in, by the way?
I hope my remarks on external quantifiers didn't sound like I though every
gadri always had one. I agree with & that some gadri never need them and
that even {le} and {lo} don't need them before lambdas and other items
that are inherently singular (or uncountable, if that sounds better). So
&'s {tu'o} seems just right in the these cases -- so long as there is an
implicit one there otherwise (which there often shouldn't be).
The predicate that goes with a name is the device for disambiguating
names: even "William Backhouse Astor IV" referred to at least two people
(second cousins, to be sure). So the predicate is one that defines the
class of things we are can talk about in a given situation -- out of which
class we pick the named one (see why this is a quantifier -- as are "the"
and the other edth word). It is not the haeceity of the one we want, but
merely the class to which that one relevantly belongs for the present
conversation.
Worlds don't need time separately, since worlds are defined temporally
(which is why subjunctive is so often a tense lexically). That is, every
world is a node on a tree spread from past to future. Each such node has
"an infinite" number of successor nodes, each differing from it in at
least one proposition. But it has only one predecessor node. That is,
time is line to the past and branching to the future and each possible
word is on some trunk of this, all going back to at least the Big Bang (or
rather just before, since it might not have happened or happened later --
or earlier, so we go back further still). We can only really make sense
of ctfs that share a past with our own -- up to a crucial point (defined
by the "if" clause, typically). which is why "If Socrates were a 17th
Century Irish washerwoman" is so hard: it is on a different trunk
altogether (or at least a branch that split off early in the -5th century,
before our Socrates was born), so we don't know enough about the situation
(what would 17th Century Ireland be like without there having been
Socrates before, say). To be sure, there are worlds along that path that
come to be almost exactly like ours, but the way they get to be has to be
so different from the way ours came to be, that it is hard to imagine what
generalizations to apply.
--
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org