Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: ci lo gerku vs lo ci gerku

[tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>]

On 10 May 2011 15:48, Michael Turniansky <mturniansky@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 10, 2011 at 6:40 AM, tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> no lo gerku cu xekri
>>
>> Not:
>>
>> lo no gerku cu xekri
>>
>>
>> mu'o
>>
>
>   But those are two different assertions.
>  In the first, we don't know how
> many dogs are in the universe of discourse, but we know no matter how many
> there are, none of them are black.  The second says there are in fact zero
> dogs (lo gerku cu nomei),  and it's the second part that really doesn't add
> any information, since any assertion about a nomei (other than an assertion
> about its cardinality, I guess) is per force true, and therefore adds no
> further information.  That's right, I am saying that "lo no gerku cu broda",
> for any value of broda, asserts one thing, and one thing only, that "lo
> gerku cu nomei".  Therefore it's neither contradictory, nor meaningless, nor
> nonsense.  It does make an assertion, it does impart information (that we
> have no dogs), it just imparts it in an efficient way, and does not impart
> any other information that it might on the surface appear to.

It does make an assertion and impart information, yes, and that
assertion and information are incompatible in the way you formed the
expression, "lo no gerku cu xekri". What is your assertion about? "lo
gerku". You want to ascribe the property "none of which are black".
And making reference to "lo gerku" is what allows any quantification
*over* it to be meaningful at all. In Lojban, we do that with the
outer quantifier:

ci lo gerku -- ci da poi gerku -- three of that which IS-DOG
no lo gerku -- no da poi gerku -- none of that which IS-DOG

The inner quantifier, on the other hand, specifies the cardinality of
the referrent itself:

lo ci gerku -- da poi gerku je cimei -- that which IS-DOG and ARE-THREE
lo no gerku -- da poi gerku je nomei -- that which IS-DOG and IS-NONE

In the latter, "no" conflicts with "lo". How exactly could we say that
there is something which is at least a dog AND whose cardinality is
zero? This is different from saying that there is none *of* something
which is at least a dog -- expressed in Lojban by means of the outer
quantifier, the real logical quantification.


mu'o

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