Re: pc answers

[jorge@phyast.pitt.edu]

pc:
>         Logical quantifiers are all also singular at heart, the apparently
> plural ones, like "there are three...," are abbreviations whose behavior,
> including instantiation, is governed by the underlying unabbreviated
> complex .

But what is the right underlying complex in Lojban? For example, how does

        re le prenu cu pencu re gerku
        Two of the people touch two dogs.

Does this mean that

1- each of the two people touches two dogs, which may or may not be the
same ones that the other person touches, or that

2- each of the two people touches each of the same two dogs?


[On multiple quantification of the same variable:]
> Subselection seems like the natural way to go.  But, like the logic
> system, the subselection supersedes the original selection, so that a
> third quantifier is a subselection of the subselection, not of the
> original selection, which is irretrievable.

I agree with that. Otherwise, one has to keep in mind an unmanageable
number of things about a given variable.


> B.  Typical/stereotypical/average.

> Indeed, most philosophically inclined discssors of this issue have said
> that _lo'e_ constructions have no meaning in isolation but only as part of
> the whole sentence in which they occur

I like that philosophy. In a given predication, I take {lo'e broda}
not as another argument, but rather as modifying the selbri by reducing
the number of arguments by one. Then the predication is not at all
about {lo'e broda}.

        ta stedu lo'e remna

is a one place predicate "... is a human head" applied to
only one single argument {ta}.

> (an argument against having them in
> the universe) and _lo_stedu_be_lo'e_remna_ probably should share in that
> contextualization

I think rather that {lo stedu be lo'e remna} is simply something
that satisfies the one place predicate "... is a human head".

> (maybe what xorxes means by insisting that the head has
> to be a _lo'e_ sort of thing, too, since it is not strictly a _lo'e_, as
> noted above).

I insisted that it would have to be a lo'e thing if it was true that
{pa da stedu lo'e remna} i.e. one and only one thing satisfies the
predicate. But I don't believe that that is true.

> It might indeed be best not to get even that much of
> concession and say simply _lo'e_remna_cu_pamei_ se_stedu_ rather than
> introducing sumti at all.

Well, I could ask {lo'e remna cu pamei se stedu ma}.

What I proposed is to say {lo'e remna cu pavyselstedu}, where the
lujvo stands for the one place predicate "... is one-headed".

Jorge