| The story so far (I apologize if I get positions misconnected to names): xod
used NU sumti, Robin-the-Canuck reported that that was ungrammatical by jbofi'e, xod replied that it should be grammatical since it made sense. Xorxes showed why it should not be grammatical - if it were then NU sumti brivla would be ambiguous, contrary to other well-established facts. Cowan added that it didn't make sense either. pc and others insisted that it did make sense and attempted to spell out some of the senses, e.g., that {ka lo broda} would be just {broda} and {ka la Cmen} as near as possible to "is called 'Cmen'" and even suggested some ways to get the form by the parser (using the usually elidable closer {kei}). pc complicated matters bynoting that there are several things that NU sumti might mean; in particular, {ka} sumti might be either of at least two associates of something referred to by the sumti, the individual concept to the thing (vishesha, what picks that thing out in every world in which it exists - or picks out its counterpart in every world that has one - and so is not a property in any world) or the sense of the sumti [this is clearer than pc's original formulation, which was buried in logical trivia] (a set of properties associated with the sumti which allows one to pick out things to which the sumti might refer in each world). pc's point is that these are different but that both need _expression_ in Lojban and neither has one at the economical level of mere NU sumti (not that the necessarily need _expression_ so compactly, being rarely used). The first of these critters is essential to the object it attaches to, makeit be who it is; the second is incidental to the object, though perhaps essential to its being called what it is called - in other worlds, the same (or counterpart) object might be called something else and what is called by this sumti might be a totally different object (or counterpart). Butwe have to get to the essence through the object and to the object through some _expression_ referring to it, whence the possible muddle. Building on this, & gets into a related -- but only incidentally - issue about the relationship between names and things (which pc introduced ina bad analogy to deal with the above case). Here the three items, thing, essence, and sense-of-sumti, come together in three theories: 1) names pick out things by convention only - even if you can infer with a high degree of certainty from a name something about the named , the connection is only social (like the relation between ordinary words and ordinary thing, considered extralinguistically) A name has NO sense. 2) A name refer to a thingby having the essence of the thing as its sense (designation,...) (and hence its referent -denotation - in intensional contexts, but I don't want to getinto that) and so picks out its referent in the usual way by checking what fits the sense, but what is involved is a transcendental function, not this-world properties. 3) The sense of a name is that of a definite description, a complex property which presumably at most one thing in the worldsatisfies. 1) is natural for Logical Positivists, 2) is needed for Fregeans, including Montagovians (and fits in nicely with Nyaya, except actually only for minima: atoms, souls and the like) and 3) makes sense of most actual uses of names of things not in intensional contexts and many that are and is required by Logical Atomists. These relate to the original problem in the sense that the original can be seen as taking the [sumti]-ness as the sense of [sumti]and then the objects as being the two choices of what that sense is. Or, it can be taken, as the choice between the sense of the sumti (essence) and the connotation (properties) of the sumti- in one sense of "connotation" (its also used for denotation and for designation - not always by different people). Lobab's veridical notion comes in only in the sense that connotations (to get a shortname for them) have actually to fit if names are disguised descriptions, whereas, if names designate essences, the connotations may be merely useful guides without being perfect fits (just like {lo} and {le}). "chicken vaisheshika," which no Indian ever was, would be the usual thing except that the inhabitants of different worlds are distinct, so that what the essence picks out is not the same thing in each world, but merely a different thing which is the "counterpart" in that world. This solves some messy onltological problems at the minor cost of having bloated body counts, and can almost solve all the problems that worlds with overlapping objects can almost solve too. Bauddha is philosophical Buddhism (usually Mahayana except where reallytight impermanence or compoundness is the issue). |