| rab.spir
<I thought an important part of {loi} was that it refers to part of the mass, not the whole thing. Wouldn't that be {lei}?> {lei} is to {loi} as {le} is to {lo}, so no; they refer to different masses xorxes: <I would say that the last is {piro loi}. Since {loi} by itself is {pisu'o loi}, it should give "there are some Chicagoans that altogether drink more than some New Yorkers". Very little informative indeed, and I'm not sure the original can even have this reading.> Right. That particular assignment, motivated by the correspondingvalue for {lo} is a part of the problem with explaining how {loi} functions, since it forces us to conceive of a mass as something other than a way of talking about a set (or rather the set's members) and means that each {loi broda} may be different. It claims to prevent paradoxes in this way, but I am not sure that that is a sufficient advantage for the problems it creates in other ways (see all the discussions of {loi} elsewhere). {lei} is much clearer than {loi} as a result. cowan: <> But our putting it that way misses what the Trobriander means > when he says (I don't know whether this is authentic) "gavagai" which is not > "There goes a rabbit" but "Lo, Mr. Rabbit." AFAIK Quine made up "gavagai" for his indeterminacy of translation thesis: we, the Westerners, think it means "rabbit", but in fact it means "sundry detached rabbit parts". Not, I suppose, physically detached!> I think -- still without the stuff around I need to check -- that this is right and my memory (as usual) played me false. So the Trobriand case and the Quinine case are different and the Q belongs more to goo theory of masses and to the argument about whether the mass of people included detached people parts. I think that one got decided in the negative, while allowing that seeing (for example) a leg was seeing the person of whom the leg was (still) a part and thus seeing loi prenu. Sorry about the muddles; I hope the point got through. |