some definitions

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

la xorxes cusku di'e

        >    la pycy cusku di'e

But I like "pycyn"  I've been away but don't names still have to end in
consonants?

        >    > OPAQUE (referentially opaque context) Terms which occur in
        >    >opaque contexts cannot be exported to surrounding transpar
        >    >ent contexts, cannot be generalized by nor used to instan
        >    >tiate external quantifiers, does not replace under external
        >    >identities, if bound need not instantiate to external
        >    > objects.  (I admit that this collapses several notions
        >    > into one,> but most logicians hold that they go together.)

        >    This seems to be the way I was using "opaque". The key point
        >    is that an opaque sumti does not instantiate to external
        >    objects, while I think {lo broda} in {lo broda cu brode}
        >    should always instantiate, no matter what {brode} is. That
        >    is a difference from English, where "a box" is transparent
        >     in "I see a box" but opaque in "I need a box". I don't
        >    think in Lojban the semantics of the selbri should influence
        >    the opaqueness of its sumti. {mi nitcu lo tanxe} should
        >    behave like {mi viska lo tanxe} as far as the instantiation
        >    properties of {lo tanxe} is concerned.

I can't understand the expression "opaque sumti" except as "sumti in an
opaque context" (see the explanation).  The _lo_tanxe_ works the same in
both cases, but the context is different, the real word with _viska_, some
intensional (and probably intentional) one with _nitcu_.  It is not the
term that changes but where it is.  And we cannot do away with that, since
we have to have words like "need" that take event description arguments.
We could do away with subject raising, perhaps, but at the cost of a lot
of wasted words (do we really care what he needs the box for?).  But then,
I probably do not understand what "instantiate" means here. In the logic
racket, instantiation is the move from a quantified sentence to the result
of replacing all occurrences of the variable bound by the dominant
quantifier by occurrences of some one singular term, going from "all x Fx"
to "Fa" (or from "Some x Fx") Now the "a box" in "I need a box" surely is
a quantifier expression and the one in "I see a box" may be, but what they
can instantiate to need not be the same, since they are in two different
contexts.  Each instantiates perfectly well within its context, however.
But the Lojban does not work, since _lo_tanxe_ is, by its form, not a
quantifier expression at all, but a singular term -- a candidate for
replacing, not for being replaced in instantiation. The two _lo_tanxe_
might refer to different boxes, since they are in different contexts.  The
problem with opacity seems to be just that we do not notice it and so make
wrong inferences and the solution is to mark it so that we won't.  If the
theory I have been peddling works out, all cases will be cases of event
descriptions and the troublesome cases will be just subject raising from
these, so the subject-raising tag will be warning enough.

        >    > INTENTIONAL.  Having to do with what an agent intends:
        >    >purpose, goal, motive, etc.  This somewhat elastic, since
        >    >objective needs are sometimes included along with subjec
        >    >tive wants.  These are always intensional.

        >    Intentional has also been used to describe a property of
        >    {le}, which does not have to do with agents, but with the
        >    speaker of the utterance. This intentionality of {le} does
        >    not make the utterance intensional, it only serves to speci
        >    fy the referent of the sumti.

Speaking is not an act nor a speaker an agent?  To be sure, "intentional"
is not being used in the above sense here, a sense which applies to
contexts again. _le_ displays some aspect of the speaker's intention but
does not describe it.

        >    >In the same discussion -- and maybe more critically --
        >    >could someone explain "specific" and "definite".  These two
        >    >words are used interchangeably by some groups and by others
        >    >to make any number of distinctions (often one group uses
        >    >one to make the distinction another makes with the other),
        >    > what exactly is going on here?

        >    I use "non-specific" to mean that the question "which
        >    one(s)?" has not been in principle answered, but the ques
        >    tion is relevant.

        >    So, in {mi klama lo zarci}, {lo zarci} is non-specific,
        >    because I only said that I go to "a market", no information
        >    was given to specify which one, but the question "which
        >    one?" must have an answer, i.e. there _is_ a market such
        >    that I go to it.

        >    The speaker need not know the answer to "which one?" for the
        >    claim to be true, but there must be one.

        >    In {mi klama le zarci}, {le zarci} is specific. The relevant
        >    question if "the market" cannot be identified by the audi
        >    ence is not "which market?", that has already been answered
        >    as "the market", the relevant question is "what do you mean
        >    by 'the market'?", or "What is the market?".

        >    In English, the dialogue: "I'm going to the market." "Which
        >    market?" does make sense, but only because the assumption by
        >    the speaker that the audience understands the referent of
        >    "the market" fails, not because the speaker left it non-
        >    specific, as in "I'm going to a market", in which case the
        >    audience has not been told the referent of "a market".

        >    That seems suitably muddled.

To me too :).

        >    > The discussion is not helped by the fact that some of the
        >    >examples of apparently non-controversial cases seem just
        >    >wrong: _lo_brida_ keeps appearing as a general term rather
        >    >than a singular one, if translation and inferences are any
        >    >guide.

        >    I don't understand that. {lo broda} means (I hope) "at least
        >    one of all things that broda". What would be general/singu
        >    lar in this case? (Those weren't in the list of definitions)

Sorry about leaving them out; it is hard to remember what parts of jargon
are common coin.  Anyhow, your specific/non-specific distinction sounds a
lot like the general/singular one: quantifiers are inherently general or
non-specific, the question of "Which one" has not been answered in
principle; names and de- scriptions, singular expressions (though in
Lojban the can refer to more than one thing), are inherently specific: the
question has been settled in princi- ple, even though we -- speaker and
hearer -- may not know the answer.

But then _lo_broda_ clearly lies on the specific side.  It looks like a
de- scription and that counts for something in a logical language. It is
historically just a correction to _le_broda_ to emphasize the correctness
of the description (as _le_broda_ and the later "dthat" of logic were
corrections to the Russell or Frege description that did not account for
context). Both have the inferences of a name, passing through negations
and the like unchanged (indeed, what would be the dual of _lo_, related to
it as "all" is to "some"?). And, of course, _lo_ binds no variable, even
implicitly, as a quantifier does.

I suspect the problem is that someone once said that _lo_ is like English
"a,"  as if that pleiomorphic (nice word, thanx djer - wasn't it) kin of
"any" meant just one (or one dozen or...) things. Often "a" is a
quantifier, as in "A whale is a mammal" or "Take a teaspoon of flour and
blend into the melted butter".  But often it is a descriptor, forming (for
want of a better word) indefinite descriptions: "A man came into a bar..."
(or -- but keep the exis- tential import out of it a moment -- "A unicorn
came into a barn...").  In that use, the continuation of the tale always
picks up the "a" description with "the".  It is that "a/the" use of "a"
that Lojban _lo_ was meant to get:  specific (the identity is fixed before
-- or at least as -- the description is uttered, supralapsarian election
as we used to say at Kirk) so like _le_, but the identity not necessarily
manifested, unlike the definite _le_, where the first user at least must
know the referent, even if he doesn't describe it too well.  Quantifiers,
by contrast, are infralapsarian, they do not really refer at all and so
what they are talking about is found established only when it is
discovered, after the utterance, in an act of instantiation (Well, this is
one story -- the one Lojban bought.  It descends from Hilbert via Hermes.
The other story, mainly from Karttunen (veion waves the flag!), is that
"a" is always a quantifier and that the "the" (our _lo_ again, mind you)
is the instantiation of it to continue the story.  Note that _lo_ still is
determined before uttered.  Karttunen's story solves djer's problem of
wanting a particular quantifier whose scope is the antecedent of the
conditional but which governs a term in the term in the consequent: "I
some boy comes, all the girls will dance with him" is just "If some boy
comes, all the girls will dance with the boy (who came).  We do not
actually have to choose between these stories, since Hermes showed that
all the standard logic of quantifiers could be reconstructed with the
indefinite descriptor.  His demonstration is not quite a word for word or
even sentence for sentence translation and it does make use of the "most
likely F" theorem -- there is an x such that if something is an F, then x
is an F -- but it serves our purpose and we can work either way.)

        >    I thought truth values were atemporal, so it wouldn't make
        >    sense that some claim is true now but not true in the future.
        >    Effectively, this means that F and not must commute, which means
        >    that F can be neither "at some time in the future" (existential
        >    quantification) nor "at every time in the future" (universal
        >    quantification). It rather has to be "at the one time in the
        >    future that I'm talking about", which commutes with "not".

        >    If the tenses are quantified with anything but unitary (is
        >    that the right word?) quantification, then we will have
        >    ambiguities with sentences with tense.

You can't have atemporal truth values and tenses in the same system, since
it is the nature of a tensed sentence to be true sometimes - when in the
appropriate relation to the event described, and false otherwise.  "It
will rain"  is true, if at all, only up until the raining starts, then "It
is raining"  comes true -- as it was not before.  It, in turns, ceases to
be true when "It has rained" and "It rained" come into their truth (well,
"It has rained" can overlap "It is raining").  We can occasionally manage
to construct a sentence that is about a particular event and is always
true, but that takes specifying the event in all its gory details as far
as date and time and place and maybe metaphysical or storical context goes
-- all the things we can fiddle with in the tense slot. This won't get us
into any (unsolvable) problems if we have a fixed notion of where pieces
go.  I used to be sure that in Lojban the implicit order of "tenses" was
modal temporal spatial negation.  Now I am not sure, nor do I remember
what the device is for shifting them -- _ku_ maybe. In any case, it all
takes place at prenex level and so the shifts in the heart of the sentence
are not affected.  (We can -- and Karttunen did -- deal with the
quantifier version of tense with the appropriate variant of the "a-the"
shift.) In short, we may not be sure what we said, but it is not ambiguous
(specific even if not definite).
pc>|83 Trying to brake etc.