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

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

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.

> 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.

> 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.

mu'o mi'e xorxes