Substance vs Bit of Substance

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

The bits of substance that I've been talking about (anything from "the 
top quarter of" to {pi ro}) are, I would claim, extensionally defined 
notions of substances.

And wants vei mo'e tu'o lo namcu ve'o lo broda to be the substance.

My god, that's ugly,and I have no idea what it means at all. Sorry, 
I'll need to come back to it.

And's main contention is that talk of the substance makes nonsensical 
any outer quantifier.

We have two ways to non-quantify things in Lojban already. Both 
intensional: Prototype and Kind.

And, give me some representative statements about substance that are 
not about bits of substance, and we'll see if they're not all Kinds or 
Prototypes.

Water is a liquid: Prototype.
I like Water: Kind (or Intension, anyway.)
Water got into my boots: Bit of substance (pisu'o djacu)

Link said something about substance as distinct from bits of substance 
too, in his paper --- where he did something like my ontology, but in 
the other direction and much more cogently: he started with atoms, then 
the goo of them, then the goo-join and the collective-join of them, and 
built up a universe. And I think what he said was they were all nominal 
masses (= kinds, I think.) But I'll check tomorrow.

Aside:

I think And is still wrong about it being impossible to count bits of 
substance: you *can* count them, if the ve memzilfendi is constrained 
(Eastern Hemisphere vs Western Hemisphere water --- cut by the 
Greenwich Meridian.) Just as you can count real numbers if you consider 
only the natural ones -- or a mapping of natural to real ones. So 
countable bits of substance exist as a subset of all bits of substance, 
and are analogous to Natural being a subset of Real numbers. Writing 
down natural numbers and saying you're counting real numbers is no less 
true than picking out bisections and trisections of space and saying 
you're counting spaces. Of course you are. And there will be spaces you 
miss, just as there will be real numbers you miss.

I think right now numbers are atomic (qua platonic ideals), and 
division is not a legitimate instantiation of ve memzilfendi. But even 
if I'm wrong, we can think of a number as being the substance of all 
smaller numbers that add up to it. That is one way to think about a 
number; it's just a nightmarishly spaced out one. :-)

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Dr Nick Nicholas. French/Italian, "Rode like foam on the river of pity
University of Melbourne Turned its tide to strength
http://www.opoudjis.net Healed the hole that ripped in 
living"
nickn@unimelb.edu.au - Suzanne Vega, Book Of Dreams
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