Re: [jboske] What is a lojbanmass? Quantification

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

> On Thu, 9 Jan 2003, Nick Nicholas wrote:

> Let's not lose sight of the fact that a collective is not signfied by >any
> particular quantification, but by the presence of emergent phenomena. It
> is numerically equivalent to plurality without emergent properties.

Hold your horses, though. Right now I am defining *only* pluralities. 
Whether they have emergent properties or not is something I'll deal 
with later.

In fact, with respect to some predicates (distributives), it is 
clearly nonsense to say that the given property is emergent: if the 
Beatles die, all four die. What i am trying to do is be able to talk 
about a group of four as distinct from four individuals. Such a group 
will necessarily have at least one emergent property (we belong to a 
group). But whether a given property is emergent of them or 
distributed of them depends on the property. If the property is 
distributed of them and not emergent, then the collective is of 
course identical to quantification over individuals.

But again: I'm saying there is no such thing as x is a collective, 
but only x is a collective *with respect to* a property. The Beatles 
are a collective of humanity, but *an individual* of {ka ce'u bende}, 
and *a substance* of {ka ce'u pu diklo la liverpul.}

I'm going slowly and formally with this...
--
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****
* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
**** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****