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Re: [jboske] Ontology #1

wrt to the first two answers:

X: 
I emphasise that an entity can be a substance with respect to one
property, and an individual with respect to another. If I eat a kiwi
fruit, I'm eating it as a substance.


I'm not sure that's right. If you're eating _a_ kiwi fruit, then
you're eating it as an individual. If you are eating kiwi fruit,
then you're eating substance. In fact you may be describing
the very same situation, but the descriptions are different (and
not equivalent).

When I eat a kiwi fruit, I also eat every possible portion of the kiwi fruit. That meets the definition of substance. Not every possible portion of the kiwi fruit is a kiwi fruit, so it fails the definition of substance there. But as you agreed, individual/substance depends on the property.

I would say two things. First, what I'm eating is an individual wrt {ka ce'u grutrxaktinidio}, but a substance wrt {ka citka ce'u}. I eat substances --- which, in another frame of reference, may be individuals instead.

Second, when you eat it, you're therefore forcing a type shift: {mi citka piro loi pa lo grutrxaktinidio}. But of course, we need not make that overt: we know that the {se citka} is a substance qua {se citka}, but when we come to naming it, we can name it as an individual wrt the other property. A lot of this logic machinery will be behind the scenes. So it must remain legal to say {mi citka lo grutrxaktinidio}.

Nonetheless, it is crucial that {mi citka piro loi pa lo grutrxaktinidio} is true, and that we retieve that expansion as an explanation of {mi citka lo grutrxaktinidio}.

And if you want to say that kiwi fruit are underlyingly individuals, how you do distinguish eating a kiwi fruit from just eating kiwi fruit, the substance? In the latter case, {mi citka piro loi tu'o grutrxaktinidio} = {mi citka piro loi su'opa lo grutrxaktinidio}

&:

I think an individual can be treated as a collective of one, and
not as a fundamentally distinct type. Hence in 3rd ExSol:


le su'o remna
le pa remna
le za'u remna

and le tu'o remna for substance.

You're doing an Occam here. I think it premature, especially since SL (and I do feel warranted in saying this) differentiates individuals (collectives of one) from collectives of more than one, by giving the former {lo} and the latter {loi}.

Psychological realism would also say Occam isn't enough of a criterion to conflate: if we don't think of individuals the same way we think of collectives, why describe them the same way?
--
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* 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. *
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