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Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
On 5/29/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
Avoiding the word "mass"/"crowd" when you say "the students" does not
mean that "the students" does not refer to a group of students. It
does.
That's the singularist view, yes. But it is not the only possible view.
Show me how and what "the students" refers to.
In the pluralist view, it does not refer to one thing. It refers to
many things,
i.e. the many students.
Additionally, I don't think that Lojban uses this mistaken concept of
"plural predication": it seems that the book that describes it has not
been published yet, and so Lojban predates it by about 20 years.
That may be true. Is your argument then that conservatism requires
that we stick with the singularist view? (CLL does concede that pronouns
at least can refer to "individuals" or "masses" depending on context,
so even there one can find, at least in embryonic form, the pluralist view.)
Then what surrounds the building? Please give an explanation,
hopefully a detailed one, as opposed to a vague 2-word answer.
I'm afraid nothing further I might add will change your mind. Luckily
for you, and for anyone else who prefers the singularist view, nothing
in Lojban prevents you from putting that view into practice. If you are
consistent with your view you simply won't apply a distributive and a
non-distributive predicate to the same sumti, you will always have
to split your bridis in two in such cases. This may make some things
more cumbersome to express, and I see nothing gained by it, but it's
always doable.
This brings us right back to:
2) You can't use {lo danlu cu bajra gi'e blabi} to refer to a white
dog and running cats,
Right, because the animals that are running are not the same animals
that are white. In the case of the students, the people that are wearing the
hats are the same people that are surrounding the building. If they were
not the same people you could not use one sumti for both predications.
and so you can't use {[L_ muno tadni] cu [dasni
lo mapku] gi'e [sruri le dinju]} to refer to a number of students and
to a mass composed of students.
Right, because the mass is not the students, so if you only allow singular
reference, you can refer either to the one mass of students or to each
one student individually.
But if you allow plural reference, then it is the very same students who
wear the hats and surround the building. In this case, the two predicates
are predicated of the _same_ referents, and so you can use one sumti to
refer to them.
A mass of students is, whether it's
convenient or not, a different entity than what each one of the
students is.
Indeed.
There is no way to refer both to "mass composed of X" and
"X" at the same time (there is no superclass).
I agree.
mu'o mi'e xorxes