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

On 7/11/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:


The issue I have still stands. We're claiming
something about something, yes?


Not about some one thing, about many things, yes.


That something, to me, is the students
treated as a single entity. How are you claiming it about the multiple
things? That it's true of them when you're considering them as a mass,
but not when they're apart?


I don't need to consider them as one thing to make a claim about them.

You may, if you want to, consider them as one thing. It makes no difference
for this particular case. It only makes a difference when we want to
combine distributive and non-distributive claims in the same sentence.


Perhaps a ..."visual" explanation of the model of thought that I'm
using would help. Imagine that you have singular 'things' (identities)
floating around up there, and relationship-strand-things connect them
to each other/abstractions. So when you think of "humanity", a certain
singular thing is brought up, and you know by following some very
strong strands that it's composed of many humans, and so on. When
someone says "the students", a single thing is created, and then
perhaps they tell you that there were 100 of them, and a strand is
spun from that thing to that number.

Now, when you tell me that something is predicated of 100 singular
things, and nothing else is involved, but that none of those 100
things has a little strand (or a series of strands) connecting it
somehow to the building, I have to wonder what the heck's being
related. And really, speaking of these 100 singular things seems
aburd: unless you're a savant, I doubt that you're capable of keeping
that many things simultaneously in your mind in the first place. My
brain seems to go with two: the fact that they're students, and the
fact that there are 100 of them.


How does your mind manage to process:

  ro le panono tadni cu dasni lo mapku

then?

I don't think the kind of pictures we can raise in our minds are relevant.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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