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Re: [lojban] etc. = mass, apparently
At 10:49 AM 03/02/2000 -0500, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
Okay, I take it back. Lojban still has one of the confusions that went into
Loglan's lo left in its understanding (maybe two, given asome remarks here).
The confusion is between the joint-action mass and the mass-noun mass (and
maybe the manifestable mass, Quine's gavagai, and the goo mass).
I have taken it, on the basis of usage, past debates, and common sense that
the Lojban mass sumti were the first of these, their properties the additive
of the members of the set "massified."
The second treats a mass like the referent of English mass nouns, as having
no natural individuations (members) but capable of indefintely many different
divisions into units -- as water can be ladled out in cups. spoons, etc. But
each of these units has to have the characteristics of the mass -- a teaspoon
of water is still water -- so that this deindivualization does not work when
what is massified is something inherently individualized
I think these two can be resolved as one, when we say that the referent is
the "linguistically relevant" properties of the mass. The mass in the
first set does not have the sum of ALL properties of the individuals. I am
not sure that the weight of a joint-action mass is well-defined but it
seems not limited to either the values for the individuals nor to the sum
of their weights. In the second, it is not clear whether a single molecule
of water is a viable unit of the mass of water (it is missing many of the
properties we associate with water, but will for example enter into a
chemical reaction as does the mass of water - so in chemistry it is and in
rainfall it is not a unit of the mass), and cups, spoons etc. are
ill-defined in absolute terms since water molecules are constantly
evaporating and condensing into the unit.
: the mass of Bob and
John can only be cut up into a Bob and a John, not a Bohn and a Job, and keep
the character of the mass.
That depends. The mass of Bob and John has 4 arms. If you cut them up,
that property changes. If you up biological parents into the two
individuals, the linguistically relevant mass property does not obtain:
(le verba cu panzi la djim joi la meris.)
The manifestation mass does allow some extention of that, in that a
manifestation of gavagai may be (apparently, Quine nor JCB is clear on this)
a rabbit part (still identifiable as such, I think) as well as a whole rabbit
-- certainly the hypothetical Trobriander is entitled to say "gavagai' on
seeing an ear or a tail or a foot and it is not clear that he is going beyond
his data in this. Whether a (cut off) ear and a (ditto) foot constitute one
piecee gavagai or two (or whether the fact that they come from one rabbit or
two makes a difference) is unclear, but it does seem to be required that what
we have is recognizably rabbitty.
in the current linguistically relevant sense.
The goo version drops this latter requirement and would have any quantity of
the goo that results from putting the set behind a mass into a blender and
running at liquify for five minutes as being a representative part of the
mass, even though it no longer has any of the identifying properties.
I'm not sure I want this mass (mess? %^)
lojbab
----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)