Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 5/15/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> 1: Can a speaker actually restrict down to what their referant is?
> (i.e. "make a complete restriction"?)
> 2a: Is it important to be able to make complete restrictions?
> 2b: Is there something that the current model doesn't handle well that
> is handled by the proposed usage?
> 3: Is there room within the current model for the proposed usage?

I would add a couple more questions prior to those:

-1: Is there a complete, universal, fixed set of referents valid for any
utterance and context, such that any given utterance will always pick its
referents from that set (with suitable restrictions)?
0: Assuming we have a referent (either picked from the context-free universal
set hypothesized in -1, or in some other context dependent way), is there
always a context-free answer to whether a given referent satisfies a
given predicate?

As an illustration of (0), in the setting that started this thread, when we
say "all stones on the table", does "on the table" include stones that
are on the board but not directly on the table? Is it even relevant to make
the distinction given the context? Does "on the table" include a stone
that may be stacked on top of another stone which is on the table? Is it
even relevant to ask that question? Do we need to define {cpana} in such
a way that for every single context, the answer to whether a stone on the
board counts as being "on the table" is always the same, independent of
the context?

mu'o mi'e xorxes