masses

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>> At this point it is a matter of guess as to what I meant over a week ago.
>
>I don't think there can be much doubt.  The only really informative
>statement is that there are masses that weigh 6 kg, there are those that
>weigh 4000000 and there are those that weigh whatever else.
>
>That's what we want to say, and the question is how to put it into
>Lojban.
>
>I don't think that it is of any interest to say that there is some mass
>that weighs either 6kg or 4000000 or something else.  That tells us
>almost nothing.

I think we are trying too hard to do this using only "loi" then.

I think we can do this better with "lo pagbu be loi remna".  There also
may be a way to mix "loi" and "lo" conventionally, like "su'o lo pisu'o
loi remna" to get this effect, but I don't feel like trying to analyze
the pros and cons of various formulations - you and And have much more
fun proposing and poking holes in formulations than I do %^)

>> I am pretty sure that I was not trying to say what ytou proposed.  In my
>> mind, 9in a given sentence, "loi remna" has some particular value.
>
>Well, we are back to square one then.  I thought we had agreed that it
>meant "some fraction of the mass of remna", and no specification as to
>which fraction.

Shall I go out a limb, probably incorrectly as to terminology, and
suggest that "loi remna" in a given claim is +definite while being
-specific; i.e. that in evaluating a given predication as true, you need
to instantiate the mass in such a way that the relationship holds, and
that this instantiation is constant/has scope over the whole of a
complex predication.

>> It is not individuated like "le", so you don't get three separate values
>> when you expand it into 3 sentences.  Thus if the 3 weights are joined by AND
>> the statement is false, because there is so particular mass of humanity
>> that weighs all 3 specific weights.
>
>You don't accept then that {la djan e la maris cu pinxe loi djacu} means
>something different from {loi djacu cu se pinxe la djan e la maris}?
>
>With the normal rule for scopes, the first one says that there is some
>mass for each of John and Mary, not necessarily the same mass, such that
>they drink it.  The second one says that there is a mass such that they
>both drink it, the same one.

Intellectually, I would prefer them to mean the same, probably the
former because of the desire for "se broda" to be symmetrical and to be
a transform of "broda" rather than a different selbri

>You seem to be using a rule for {loi} different than the rule for {lo}.
>That is not necessarily illogical, but it doesn't fit well with how the
>other quantifiers work.  Whatever is the rule, it would be nice to have
>it settled once and for all.

What rule for "lo"?  I haven't used multiple "lo"s in sentences much to
have devised any sense of what I think the rule should be.  I'll accept
that this is the rule for "da poi" which is order dependent in the same
way "naku" is.

My inclination would be to make the rule that, in the absence of
explicit prenex scope or scope implicit through the use of bound
variables like "da", that scope be determined by sumti number (x1/x2/x3)
order.  Jumping ahead in these threads, I would accept that there might
be desirable an afterthought capability to override this order to make a
given sumti have broadest scope or least scope (or perhaps some
intermediate value).  At this time of night this idea is mushing
together with pc's "context leaper" xVV proposal(s) that may or may not
have anything to do with it - the commonalty seems to be the desire to
specify a scope other than that implicit in the stated syntax.

I'd like to have things settled too %^).  I do want to explicitly thank
pc, because I think his comments actually settled something -
specifically the meaning of "lo'e" (though I'll really believe it when
Cowan has put into the refgrammar and everyone agrees).

The refgrammar as the standard for what has or has not been decided
seems to be starting to take new importance.  In the past, the gismu and
cmavo lists and the YACC grammar were sufficient to form a standard.
This suggests that the time is becoming ripe for John to finish the
papers in some form or another, and I finally review them with an eye
towards some degree of Lojban semantics baseline.

But when will John and I find time???

lojbab