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

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.


> 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

I find that an inconvenience even in a simple case like this, and a big
headache in more complex cases.



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.

  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.


> 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}.


> > > 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
(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.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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