Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Well, I don't like the the 'ganai... gi ..' format since that would allow for empty sumti, which are undesirable (if not incomprehensible) for a variety of reasons.  And yes, there is no general rule for 'ro<sumti>' nor can I think of a reason to expect one.  Sumti refer to things in a variety of ways and quantifiers naturally take these differences into account.  I we are going to have plural quantification, then that has to be the fundamental form and others derive from it.  The most obvious way to deal with the problems that appear to arise from this is to adapt the rules for quantifiers to what is quantified over (given that we are now in fact quantifying over things that no actual logic quantifies over and so we are winging it).  If this gives undesirable results, then perhaps we need further rules about transitivity, though these get increasingly hard to formulate.  Alternatively, we can do away with plural quantification. which leads to problems,
 given that terms have plural referents and instantiate bound variables, so that, then, variables don't cover their instances. Of course, we can also drop plural reference and go back to singularity and get plurality explicitly when needed by the distinction between, say, 'lo' and 'loi' (well, not plurality exactly, rather the interesting correlate of it, collectivity). Quantifiers continue to work differently depending on what the term applied to is -- 'ro lo broda' is presumably partitive, 'ro loi broda' multiplicative, and so on.



----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Tue, April 20, 2010 9:49:20 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] About plural 'ro'

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 11:22 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well, as I said, if you use 'ko'a' then you have at best a purely denotative expression and you are stuck with what you get out.  Which means, of course, be  careful what you do with those expressions.  If you work with 'ko'a' and quantify, then you do indeed get all the pluralities and no filter.  If you work with designative expressions you get the filter. All three of your sentences are apparently equivalent and apparently all false.This is all about language, after all, not about reality.

So if I'm reading you correctly, you are saying that for you "ro ko'a
cu brode" and "ro lo broda cu brode" do not necessarily mean the same
even if "ko'a" and "lo broda" have the exact same referents? One can
be true and the other false? Certainly not the way I understand how
quantifiers work with sumti. For me "ro <sumti> cu broda" is always
"ro da zo'u ganai da me <sumti> gi da broda", i.e. "for any x, if x
is/are among the referents of <sumti>, then x broda", and that for me
should work whether ro/da end up being defined as singular
quantifier/variable or as plural quantifier/variable. Alternatively,
if you don't like the ganai ... gi ... expansion (I forget which one
is the one you don't like) you can say that it's "ro da poi me <sumti>
zo'u da broda", i.e. "for any x among the referents of <sumti>: x
broda", for any <sumti>.

I'm not sure what you gain by treating different sumti differently.

> The referents of plural variables are of course individuals, but may be several of them at once -- that is the problem.  Similarly some predicates can take only inidivudals as arguemtns, others can take several individuals as once as arguments (I'm skipping over the L-set reading with some difficulty here).  When the filter works, it filters out the inappropriate cases, where one variable has an inappropriate number of referents.  t also filters out appropriate numbers where the predicate doesn't apply: "carried the piano" allows plural referents for its subject, but not all the the subpluralities may be also true subjects of the predicate and so "all who carried the piano" will not cover them, though it may cover others of the same size  or smaller.

So you don't have any general meaning for "ro <sumti> cu broda"
without knowing what the internals of <sumti> are, right?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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