Re: [lojban] Explicit non-restriction

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 10:15 AM, Daniel Brockman <dbrockman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> So you're saying that {ma poi me ro da} actually ends up
> restricting {ma} to *each* thing?  In other words, it would
> have to be everything at the same time?

My comment was meant to be about "ro da" in general, not about its
particular use in "me ro da".

"me PA da" doesn't strictly make any sense with PA as a proper
quantifier, because what "me" needs is something with referents (so it
can create the selbri "x1 is among the referents of <sumti>"), and
what PA as a quantifier does is quantify a bridi, so we need to
interpret "me PA da" in some way and the obvious choice is as "me lo
PA da", where PA is no longer a quantifier. "lo ro da" is the sumti
that has everything in the universe of discourse as referents, and so
"ma poi me (lo) ro da" indeed makes no restrictions, because any
number of things can be among the total number of things without the
need for an aggregate of them.

So, I wasn't really objecting to what you were doing, but just to the
wording "everything is a referent of {ro da} (by definition)".

"ro da" is an operator on a bridi, not something with referents.

> I should have known better than to use logical quantification
> without knowing what I'm doing. :-)

Lojban pretends to be spoken logical notation, but then it does some
weird things, like sticking quantifiers on terms, that need to be
untangled and translated into proper logical notation anyway, so not
much unlike natlangs.

>>>> What if the answer is {no da}?
>>>
>>> You can still answer {no da}.
>>
>> Right, the answer to a question is never limited by the form of the
>> question. How to answer a question is always a matter of pragmatics.
>> The form of the question can only suggest the form of the answer, but
>> if one needs to change the form in order to be truthful, informative,
>> clear and relevant, one should not hesitate to do so. What matters to
>> the person asking something is that you tell them what they want to
>> know, not that you fill in a form properly (at least if they are a
>> person and not a machine or a bureaucrat).
>
> Yes, of course.  In this case, though, wouldn't it also make
> sense to a machine?  It seems to me that you can always
> sensibly answer {no da} to a {ma} question.

Well, yes, sort of. "Always" is always tricky. How can you sensibly
answer "no da" to:

   ma du da

I suppose in an empty universe of discourse you can.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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