RE: [jboske] pc's comments on Nick's: "Monty's Unicorns, Fermat version", and a couple other issues

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

some more responses to pc's other comments:

> >The bit about a name having to have a property to be used comes from the 
> >fact that names are quantifiers (this cuts the grammar size roughly in 
> >half, eliminating a vast array of duplicates) and quantifiers are all 
> >restricted (second order relations between sets). Taking the properties 
> >to be a haeceity was a mistake I remember arguing with (probably) Gaifman 
> >back when I was studying to be a Nyayika and so a believer in 
> >visheshas. Even without vishesha, using this as haeceity seems to me a 
> >bad idea, since it makes transworld comparisons (ctfs like "If Socrates 
> >were a Seventeenth century Irish washerwoman") impossible to deal with 
> >naturally 

Unfortunately this went over my head. If anyone can explain it to me
at my level, I'd be interested.

> >Back those damned unicorns. I still support the peculiar gadri (NOT any 
> >of the ones in standard -- nor, so far as I had seen when I took off, 
> >non-standrad [& and X] -- Lojban). As xorxes pointed out, what is 
> >involved is a buried quantifier -- one in another world if we must or one 
> >in what amounts to an equivalence -- though stronger than material. "I am 
> >looking for a unicorn" amounts to "I am on a quest which will be completed 
> >(/satisfied/relieved/...) just in case there is a unicorn I see (/capture 
> >/touch/...)" The fact that the critters involved here are regularly 
> >called "any one will do" shows that what is involved is purposive (do for 
> >what?) and intimately involved with notions like satisfaction. I would 
> >take this new gadri as an improper symbol, not translatable alone but 
> >pointing to longer expression that must be translated as a whole (that is, 
> >as a simple surface phenomenon from a very complex deep structure 
> >involving lexical replacements as well as syntactic ones) 

I have suggested a LAhE (or UI) for this purpose, rather than a gadri.

--And.