| In a message dated 5/25/2001 2:44:49 AM Central Daylight Time,
edward.cherlin.sy.67@aya.yale.edu writes: <In Quine's set theory and in many others, sets are commonly defined How did this word get into Lojban in the first place? I understand lo'i (the set of individuals that...) but who thought of "mass of individuals" and what did *he* think he meant by it?> Not Quinine set theory but the Quine of underdeterminate theories and indeterminate translations is on of the sources of JCB's mass. (Though he was a social psychologist, he was of the generation that got disastrous doses of logical positivism and actually tried to apply it, so I assume he read Quine first, then picked up Malinoswski and the Trobrianders later.) So part of the ancestor of {loi} is "gavagai" and Mr. Rabbit. A second part is mass nouns in English -- though without the "piece of" idiom. A third part is the disambiguation of sentences like "Chicagoans drink more beer tha New Yorkers" These three lie behind the three metaphors I tried for {loi}. Each is incomplete and misleading in various ways (theology again), but they all try to make the behavior of {loi broda} vis a vis the individual broda plausible. The Platonic ideal nor the Neo-Platonic/Gnostic/Hermetic myth don't work so well, for it is (on this story) really Mr. Rabbit totally that does what each rabbit does, not some pale copy and not some piece embedded in the prison of flesh -- and not even a good Hindu maya, for the individual and the mass individual are equally totally real. The problem with using {lo'i} is that sets have a very limited range of activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink beer. About all they can do is have members, include or overlap or be included in other sets, and have cardinalities. Not very useful, as xorxes keeps pointing out. We no doubt could develop some idioms involving sets, but none have achieved much currency -- and masses do seem to cover the most tempting cases. <o "teams" that are not sets but have members, like...what?> Well, teams. Teams(and all the other things) are sets, of course, but it is not there setness that is of interest, rather it is some other relation among the members of the set that we want. <Each of these supposedly grammatical theories is in fact an ontology. Since we can't very well agree on the correct ontology on behalf of the rest of humanity, it would be better if we had a way to specify an ontology explicitly when we needed it. That is however a can of worms that I am happy not to have to deal with the reality of.> Well, they could be ontologies (and so could every grammar, of course) but here they are meant simply as metaphors, theories in mythic form if you will (more theology). <Please note that in Buddhist ontology some things are said not to fall in any of the categories Existence Non-existence Both existence and non-existence Neither existence nor non-existence> Well, strictly, not that some things fail to be in any of these categories, but that for some things (alreay an error, probably) the Buddha refused to say that they belonged to any of these categories (the Jains would go three categories more, but the ruined it by saying that everything did fall into one of those -- "maybe"). Buddha said {na'i} (cf. the Athanasian creed "We may not say that..."). <>Reminders of these would be very welcome. Well, let's see...How about> I was looking for other metaphors that have been used for {loi} , especially those that & produced some time ago and that I can't faind at the moment. Your suggestions get us off into ontology, and that is another day's work. One more metaphor: the mass of individuals sums up the properties of the individuals: literally in the case of weight (or beer drinking), logically in a lot of cases (inhabiting Africa, for example) and in some undefined -- though intuitively obvious -- sense in many other cases (the performance of the team is the "sum" of the actions of the various team members, a mob does the sum of the actions of its members, etc.) |