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

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

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

> On 7/19/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > --- Jorge Llamb�as <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > What is the difference between wearing a hat and carrying a chair that
> > > makes "the students carry chairs" c-true but "the students wear hats"
> > > not c-true, when in both cases each student does?
> > >
> > At least two things: 1) hats, by their nature, can only be worn by one person at a time, so
> the
> > collective does not make sense
> 
> So the rule would be:
> "Whenever the collective reading would make sense, d-true implies c-true,
> otherwise, it doesn't"?
> 
> I find that rule very odd.
>

I don't think there is a rule.  I can imagine a case (even if I can't produce one at the moment)
where both the collective and the distributive make sense but, in fact, only one of them holds. 
For example, any number of people (well, some more than one anyhow) might be under a sheet, but in
fact only one might be under each one.  Thus, the students are under sheets would be d-true and
c-truth would make sense but does not in fact hold in this case. Each predicate has its own logic
about what ahppens.  for example, McKay's favorite (and totally screwed up) example of "compete"
in which c-true for any several things entails both not d-true and also that it is c-true for
every pair, triple and so on from the several originals. And, beyond the meaning postulates for
each predicate, there are a variety of factual cases: where, for ecxample, both c- and d- might
apply or where c entails some arrangement of lesser ccases or some arrangment of lesser cases
entails c (as in your students with chairs -- not a rule about carrying chairs, just a fact of
this case).


> > 2) "hats" is indefinite: if it were "the students wore THE hats" a
> > collective would be possible because we now have a specific group to cover, that is we can get
> a
> > group-group relationship which is not available with the indefinite (to be sure three is the
> group
> > of worn hats, but that is not mentioned, it merely is.
> 
> At this point I was asking about "the students wear hats" vs. "the students
> carry chairs". I presume "the students carry chairs" is c-true even when
> each student carries one chair, isn't it? If so, (2) does not count as
> a difference.

True; I was working in my head on my own case (The students carried the chairs) 

> > Note that the collective sense for wearing
> > hats can only arise from the distributive one, whereas the case for carrying chairs might come
> > from any arrangement of the members of the group and the chairs.
> 
> "Individually", "in pairs", "in groups of three", "in groups of varying number",
> "all together" are all different particular cases, and "individually"
> does not seem
> to warrant a special d-true to contrast it with a c-true for all the
> rest. Certainly
> "individually" and "all together" are special cases, because they are the two
> extreme ones, but I don't see any obvious reason to lump all the intermediate
> cases with the "all together" case to the exclusion of the "individually" case.

 I hope I didn't.  The logic recognizes two cases: distributively and collectively.  There are any
number of other possibilities (pairwise, and so on) which are apparently not general enough to
count as cases worht treating logically separately at this level (cf. case of "all" and "some" vs.
"one", "five" and the rest).  the other cases can be handled but only with more complex
expressions -- in the logic: I am not sure about just how that will all play out in Lojban. 
> mu'o mi'e xorxes
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