Re: [lojban] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

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

----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, October 31, 2010 3:34:00 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 11:15 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 12:56 AM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> 
>wrote:
>>
>> But the event of wearing a hat is abstract in Lojban terminology
>
> I know, that's why I say Lojban terminology is so haywired sometimes.
>
> **I don't see the problem here; "abstract term" means one whose selbri (God I
> hate Lb terminology) is constructed using cmavo of a certain kind (or array of
> kinds).

Are "lo fasnu", "lo se ckaji", "lo se djuno", "lo se viska" abstract,
by that definition? Their selbri are not constructed using cmavo of
the kind you have in mind.

**Nice point.  I suppose they are (I'm not sure about 'viska') or, better, as 
you say, the use of abstraction is not very useful.

>> (and semantics, since it is a type or some such notion)
>
> So when I say:
>
>     mi viska lo nu do dasni lo mapku
>
> is there some problem? Is that a different sense of "viska" from:
>
>     mi viska lo mapku
>
> **No, but it is looking at a different object, in this case allowing for
> delusions or or other sorts of misseeings.  If you're sure your perception 
>there
> is veridical (love slipping that word in from time to time) then go ahead and
> raise.  You still may be wrong, of course, but that was always a risk. 'nu' is
> probably not the best choice for an abstractor here.

So "abstractions" can be visible. What would be the best choice of
"abstractor" here, if not "nu"?


**I don't remember, something about the sense data I received and what they 
would correlate with normally.  Not that you can't observe an event (token), of 
course.  But Lojban has not been kind to token-type distinctions 

> The plan was never a coherent one, and the implementation was a total
> disaster, since many people are now convinced that "mi djica ta" for
> "I want that" is incorrect Lojban.
>
> **Well, it is true that the need to be careful in these places has been
> overstressed, with the results you report, that doesn't mean the plan was a 
bad
> one nor incoherent.

I still don't see how it is coherent to require hats to always be
tokens, but allowing hat-wearings to be sometimes types and sometimes
tokens. There is nothing in the semantics of hats and hat-wearings to
warrant the distinction, nor in the syntax of "lo mapku" and "lo
mapnundasni".

**Well, good.  I don't like token type talk as much as you do, and "abstraction" 
is misleading.  So the hat or the hat-wearing you see is individual and 
concrete. So, too, is the apple or the eating of an apple or the having of one 
that you desire.  The difference is that that concrete individual is not of this 
world (or, at least, is not claimed to be usually).  Now, we have chosen to mark 
this by bringing in events and properties and various other things to make the 
case.  That choice made sense at the time and we now may be stuck with it, but 
there may well be more transparent ways of doing what is needed here.  By the 
way, the problem is not in the semantics of 'lo mapku' or 'lo maonundasni' but 
in that of 'viska' and 'djica'  and the like.

> It may be that the choice of abstractors to use was wrong
> (I personally think it all comes down to propositions, since I am reasonably
> sure they exist and am much less sure about any of the others).

Would you have propositions be visible, or just desirable? If just
desirable, would they be desirable in the same way that objects can be
desirable?

**I don't think that propositions are visible and only rarely are they 
desirable, but what I meant was that we could use 'ka' as a universal mark for 
the sorts of things that turn up in these messy cases.  That is, that what I am 
experiencing bears a certain relation -- different for different predicates, but 
all embedded in counterfactuals -- to a proposition.  Somewhere in that 
counterfactual clause (or plural) there is a 'lo broda'.  When the referent of 
that is in this world and can function there as in the other, then we can raise 
that expression to the place occupied (at some level of the grammar) by 
reference to the proposition.  And no mayhem results. There are probably several 
levels of caveats and quibbles disregarded here, but that is the gist. 


      

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