RE: [jboske] What is a lojbanmass? Quantification

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

Nick:
> And, because I don't have the time to lawyer this yet (and I have not 
> even looked at CLL!), deem everything I said in my latest to be my 
> proposal, not a statement of SL. My intent is to make a proposal 
> backward compatible with SL, but not to state what SL is, because SL 
> doesn't even know what a substance is 
> 
> What I do not want is a situation where {loi remna} cannot refer to 
> the subsance of a human; because SL clearly states that it can 

I'll comment on it in the light of this, then.

> You can halve anything. My contention is, though, that since 
> individuals don't have halves (half an And is not Andm, half an apple 
> is not an apple), halving an individual gives you substance (half of 
> And is And-goo, not a human being And.) 

Half a piece of string is still a piece of string. Half a ball of
wax is still a ball of wax. Okay, these aren't individuals by
your definition, but they are countables, and as far as I can
see are lojban individuals. Individual is not the same as
'quantum'.

Furthermore, even if nicolaic fractional quantificaation yields
substance, the input can be a nicolaic individual -- quantification
is over bits of nic-individual.

> I do not want quantifiers to 
> be able to convert between ontological types, and turn individuals 
> into substances --- reasonably so: quantifiers quantify, their 
> quantificand is meant to be already given. 

But that can't be, if the quantificand is a sumti. Put gadri
aside for a moment and consider {ro mi} and {pi ro mi}: {mi}
on its own refers to a su'omei, so if you add a quantifier
it must underlying express {(pi)PA broda be me}, where the
value for broda is either prescribed or glorked from context.
So the quantificand is not (necessarily) already given.

That said, I myself don't think that outer PA should determine
whether the description is an individual- or collective- or
substance-defining property. That IMO is a job for inner PA,
or, if you want to stick closer to SL, for the gadri.

> So I prefer to convert the 
> individual to be halved into substance first, and then fractionally 
> quantify over that 

You're quantifying over bits of substance, not over substance.
Since the same fractional quantifier can arguably quantify over
members of a collective or set, too, I agree that the lo-phrase
before application of the quantifier must be converted into the
desired type.

--And.