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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
On 5/27/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
On 5/27/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 5/27/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/27/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On 5/27/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > > All I'm saying is that the view that
> > > > does not introduce any encompassing entity is, for me at least, the most
> > > > useful. That way I can say:
> > > >
> > > > le mu no tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e sruri le dinju
> > > > "The fifty students wore hats and surrrounded the building."
> > > >
> > > > without claiming that there was any single entity that both wore a hat
> > > > and surrounded the building.
> > >
> > > This is a somewhat absurd misrepresentation (or misunderstanding) of
> > > my position. I've never said that this entity (the mass of students)
> > > would wear a single hat; this is clearly and absolutely wrong. But
> > > this entity /would/ surround the building. We say two things: "50
> > > things wear hats", "1 thing surrounds the building".
> >
> > Right. I suppose it doesn't bother you that the same phrase {le mu no
> > tadni} is being used to refer to the fifty things and also to the one thing at
> > the same time.
>
> I don't think it's right, which is why I don't support your ambiguous
> "individual here, together there" use of {lo}.
Then I don't understand why the above was an absurd misrepresentation
of your position.
Because
1 {le mu no tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e sruri le dinju}
is not the correct way to say
2 "The fifty students wore hats and surrounded the building."
In fact, (2) is not the 'correct' way to say it either - (2) is a
shortened form of
3 "The fifty students wore hats and together surrounded the building."
There is nothing that we're trying to say in 2 which is not said more
aptly by 3. 3 is the proper way to say 2.
> > Personally, I prefer to say that it just refers to the fifty things,
> > and that both claims are about those fifty things only. But in the end it
> > doesn't really matter. If we both agree that the sentence is proper Lojban,
>
> Which sentence? No, I don't think that it's ok to use {lo cribe}
> individually in one part, and then as a mass in another part. You
> should use lu'o or similar.
So you would not allow the conjunction of a distributive and a
non-distributive predicate. You would require splitting it into two
bridi such as for example:
le mu no tadni cu dasni lo mapku i je lu'o le go'i cu sruri le dinju
No, that would mean that connectives are unimportant, and they are.
I find that an inconvenience even in a simple case like this, and a big
headache in more complex cases.
If you were to make a list of priorities, "convenience" would rank
lower than "properness". I'm arguing that your (very slightly more)
convenient way is improper. Arguing that my way is inconvenient does
nothing for you if I'm demonstrating that your way is improper. First,
we decide which way is proper. Then, we think of a way to make it
convenient.
You would say:
{le muno tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e sruri le dinju}
"50 students wore hats and surrounded the building"
I would consider that incorrect, and would rather say:
{le muno tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'e lu'o lego'i sruri le dinju}
"50 students wore hats and together they surrounded the building"
(Perhaps {loi} is better than {lu'o})
(I'm not perfectly sure about {lego'i}, maybe one of
{vo'a/ko'a/la'edi'u/ra} is more correct)
Of course, if you think that {lu'o lego'i} is a big headache, then
perhaps you'll support something like:
{le muno tadni cu dasni lo mapku gi'eloi sruri le dinju}
But I guess onwards with demonstrating that your (and McKay's)
perception of masses is incorrect. I'll remind you of my objection to
your conception of "mass":
-quote-
On 5/27/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
The non-singularist view holds that you can make a predication about
several things without having to distribute it or having to introduce
an encompassing single entity.
How exactly is this sensible? X is a surrounder of the building, but
only when you look at it as her being in the company of A..W? X the
groupmate surrounds the building, but X does not? No, X the groupmate
does not surround the building. A..X, together/as a group/mass
surround the building.
A quote (of supposedly McKay) that I found:
The fact that some individuals are surrounding a building does not
automatically imply that some single individual (of any kind)
surrounds the building.
Yes, it does imply that. In this case, the mass of students is that
entity. Just because a mass does not take on a distinct physical shape
does not mean it's not there.
Let's say that 10 soldiers then surrounded the students (together, and
not in the sense that these 10 soldiers each hugged a student). We
have a way to say this: "the squad surrounded the students". Yes, we
do explicitly treat groups as entities. You can't simply say "well,
look! No definite entity is mentioned explicitly, and I won't bother
to see if an implicit entity exists. After all, it's ridiculous to
think that some things seen together could just 'magically' be seen as
a new entity, right? ...and therefore no entity exists".
-endquote-
> Ok, so your rule for using {lo} distributively/ambiguously is "if the
> outer is blank, it is ambiguous, otherwise, distributive", correct?
For any sumti whatsoever, not just for {lo}, I take an outer quantifier
to be distributive, yes.
I take this to mean that your{re loi ci nanmu} means something
entirely different from "(only) 2 of the group of 3 men" ("...carried
the piano"), yes?
Q <sumti> cu broda
Q of the referents of <sumti> are such that each is/does broda.
For me, {lo} simply says nothing about distributivity, just as {lo mlatu} says
nothing about the colour of cats. If you want to call that "ambiguous", suit
yourself, but it is getting a bit jarring.
For me, {lo} implies distributivity, just as {lo mlatu} implies
"feline". You seem to be unaware of my position: I don't think that
{lo} is ambiguous. To me, it means the exact same thing each time. It
doesn't mean "individually" in one situation, and "as a mass" in
another, all based on context. No.
Here is a simple demonstration:
your{lo mu tadni sruri lo pa grana}
could mean either:
"together the five students surrounded the pole"
"the five students each surrounded the pole"
So, yes, I want to call that ambiguous, and I'm perfectly correct in
my usage of the word. I find your insistence that "ambiguous" refers
only to gismu-like words with multiple meanings to be disagreeable,
both with me and with the common dictionary definitions linked to
earlier.
> > Right. I probably misunderstand your use of quotes then. When you say
> > "X" means "Y", you don't mean that you can replace X with Y and get the
> > same meaning, then?
>
> u'i, ok:
>
> "did you see [all of a contextually sensible group of bears] when you
> went to the zoo?"
> "did you see all *the* bears when you went to the zoo?"
>
> ...are equivalent. Yes, you can replace them. The simple implication
> of non-relevant bears noes *not* include those irrelevant bears in the
> *contextually sensible/relevant* group of bears.
I'm afraid I still don't follow your notation. The thing in square brackets
is something that the speaker is supposed to utter, or is it something
that we as outsiders, not in the context of the utterance, use to describe
what the speaker means? If it's something that we as outsiders use, OK.
If it's something that the speaker might say, which is what I thought you
were saying, then it doesn't correspond to {lo ro cribe}.
It's something that the speaker says. How does the bracketed portion of:
"did you see [all of a contextually sensible group of bears] when you
went to the zoo?"
not correspond to your{lo ro cribe}? What English phrase does your{lo
ro cribe} correspond to? *Don't* tell me that it just corresponds to
"all bears", because "all bears" is vague/ambiguous/has multiple
interpretations. Explain exactly what you mean by "all bears", if that
is indeed what it corresponds to. Do you mean each bear ever to exist?
Do you mean all bears that have been mentioned? Do you mean as many
bears as a human can think of in the course of an hour? Perhaps you
mean all bears of a certain easy-to-define-from-context group of
bears?
> > > > sensibility is something that you can discuss in the metalanguage,
> > > > when discussing what a phrase means, it is not something that you
> > > > can incorporate into the phrase without changing its meaning.
> > >
> > > Luckily, we're not incorporating it into the phrase, rather we're
> > > talking about its meaning within the phrase.
> >
> > OK, in that case we may be in agreement. {lo ro mapku} refers to all things
> > that count as hats in the context where the phrase is used, not to things that
> > may count as hats in other contexts, since those other things by definition
> > are inaccessible in the context where the phrase was used. It cannot therefore
> > be equivalent to another phrase with a restriction in it.
>
> What cannot be equivalent to what other phrase with what kind of
> restriction in it?
If the speaker says {lo ro cribe poi zvati le dalpanka}, the very act of saying
those words brings bears not in the zoo into the universe of discourse
Sure, but just because you 'brought a whole bunch of bears into the
discourse', doesn't mean that your{lo ro cribe} will refer to all of
them later. For example, we might talk about all bears in the forest,
and then I might ask you your"did you see all the bears when you went
to the zoo?" question:
xu do pu viska lo ro cribe ca lo nu do vitke le dalpanka
Did you see all bears when you visited the zoo?
The your{lo ro cribe} would refer not to "all bears that have ever
been brought up" (i.e. bears in the forest), but clearly to a
contextually *sensible* group of bears, that is, the bears in the zoo.
(otherwise the restriction would be pointless). If the speaker says only
{lo ro cribe}, it may be the case (depending on the rest of the discourse) that
only bears in the zoo count as bears for that discourse.