Transparancy

[Gerald Koenig <jlk@NETCOM.COM>]

PC continues:

        Adding to my last posting, mehr Licht?
             Another feature of opaque contexts, which I forgot to men-
        tion, is that Leibnitz's Law does not work in them: from a=b and
        [a] we cannot infer [b].  This is certainly the case if one term
        of the identity is a description, since what fits (or is intended
        to fit) a description can vary with context.

GK>     [Speaking of the sentence, "I saw someone shooting pool."]

GK> Perhaps in this case it is so clear what the "someone" refers to,
that the opaque, event formulation is not opaque. The "someone" seems
to be clearly the same person whether inside or outside the
parentheses. This could be a consequence of an implied pointing to an
individual. To see someone normally implies a light ray pointing to the
person. An indefinite description normally would specify a range of
individuals. This could be an instance of a definite description which
is traditionally equivalent to a proper name. I hear you when you say
that the traditional interpretion may not be practical. I understand
that The President=Bill is different from Bill=The President, where
there are thousands of Bills in the phone book. But I think there will
be a price to be paid if the equivalence of a definite description to a
name is abandoned.

        PC> It is less certain for proper names, since some logicians
        hold that names are rigid designators, referring to the same
        thing in all contexts (at least all those in which the thing
        named exists).  But proper names in natural languages do not
        seem to meet this requirement -- more than one thing can have
        the same name, for example, even in a single context.  Thus,
        ordinary proper names seem to behave pretty much like
        descriptions under this rule (as the Lojban placement -- and
        official reading -- of _la_ suggests) and had best be thought
        not to be replaceable under identity.
             I found in the avalanche of the last couple of weeks a
             note from lojbab that mentions that the mark for raised
        subjects is _tu'a _, which is then the opacity marker under the
        suggestion in that posting (_xe'e_ in its non-experimental
        form).
             OTOH some expressions in English contain event-referring
        expressions but seem to be transparent: " I saw someone
        shooting pool," for example.  This pretty clearly does imply
        that there is someone that I saw shooting pool.  Indeed, if it
        could be shown that there was no one shooting pool in my visual
        range, I would have withdraw my original claim, falling back to
        "I thought I saw..." or "It looked like ..." or whatever.  But
        notice that the basic claim is not exactly the classic English
        form of an event-referring expression, a "that"-clause or an
        infinitive. "I saw that someone was shooting pool" does seem to
        be opaque, approximately equivalent to "came to know ... by
        seeing" and so inheriting the opacity of "know," failing to
        export when I could not identify the player -- presumably by
        sight. Thus, we might argue that the object of "see" in the
        transparent case is not the event but rather just the subject,
        to which the event-reference is somehow attached.  That is, it
        may be that the analysis of "I saw someone playing pool" is not
        "I saw (someone playing pool)" but "I saw someone (playing
        pool)", which would both account for the transparency and fit
        in with our general notion that the object of seeing is an
        object not (generally) an event.  That leaves the question of
        how the "someone" and the "playing pool" are to be linked
        together, for it is not just that the someone was in fact
        playing pool but that I saw him doing it, so there is an
        event-referring expression here after all, though perhaps
        subordinately.  None of the obvious suggestions in Lojban
        (e.g.  _poi_ or _noi_) seems quite right.  Comments and
        suggestions welcomed eagerly.  pc>|83


GK> It seems to me that in both cases "someone" and "playing pool" are
related as subject and predicate, or sumti and selbri.
"I saw someone shooting pool" has two interpretions for me.

1. I saw a person, and that person was playing pool.
2. I saw an event, and that event was a person playing pool.

For the lojban I am going to truncate playing_pool to playing [zo'e].
I don't have a lot of confidence in bolga'a jubme.

1'. mi pu viska paboi prenu ije ri kelci
2'. mi pu viska lo nu paboi prenu cu kelci.

The selbri viska takes an object or an event indifferently as the X2.
I wish someone could explain the semantic difference in these sentences.
They mean pretty much the same thing to me.

If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the 'prenu' in
sentence 2' is opaque. Or rather that it should be opaque but isn't.
Here again I feel it would not be opaque because it is a very clear
identification. Identification means uniqueness, and hence transparency.

I hope this makes sense to you, I am still somewhat diaphanous about
transparency and opaqueness.

djer