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

[John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net>]

--- Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?


So far as I can tell the answers to these two are
No and No.
 
> 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?

It seems that in the given context "on the table"
is taken to be transitive (i.e., something on
something on the table is on the table), but I
wouldn't want to push this and I certainly
wouldn't take it to be a universal about "on" (or
even "on the table").  Even the present situation
description, to the extent that it leaves certain
questions unanswered, question which might be
important in another description of "the same"
situation, means the questions -- although
apparently answered -- might yet be relevant to ask.