Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

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

Almost like a natural language, Lojban contains bits and pieces left over from 
earlier stages.  This is especially true of descriptors, which have been a topic
for debate for half a century at least.  In particular, there was once a time 
when we had to warn people that if they said 'lo ci gerku' they were saying,
inter alia, that there are exactly three dogs in the who universe and that they 
probably wanted either 'ci lo gerku' or maybe (but we weren't quite sure what 
this meant) 'lo ci lo gerku'.  That is, 'lo gerku' referred to all the dogs in 
the domain.  Gradually, that changed, along with a variety of changes in (and 
muddles about) the meaning of 'lo', until now it is almost the veridical 
parallel of 'le', differing only in the specificity (or is it definiteness?) of 
the referent.  We don't have to have particular dogs in mind to use 'lo'.  

Another of these relics is "mass" (and, presumably, 'gunma').  A number of years 

ago (on a list far far away) someone listed 10 (I think, but thereabouts anyway) 

uses that had been applied to that word in Logjam discussions.  A few of these 
have dropped out or been dealt with elsewhere (the Osterizer sense, say, and the 

related minimal bit sense).  What now seems to be the most prominent is the 
collective sense, though just what that involves is still problematic, mainly 
about questions of what sort of participation is needed to be in the mass (is 
the organizer of a sit-in in the mass even if not present at the sit-in?, does 
the batboy count when the team wins a game?)  For all that the examples seem to 
be about assigning credit or blame, there are purely logical questions as well, 
the foremost being the relation of individuals to the property which defines 
their agglomeration,  

To me, the present discussion seems to have into a large variety of traps, 
factual, logical and conceptual, and that makes solving the issue (does anyone 
remember what the issue was?) difficult.

The first problem is simple out-of-date information,  CLL was old news even 
before it was published and the history of Lojban since then has been mainly 
about correcting it, minimally bringing it up to date for some point in time 
(now hopelessly lost) or trying to keep up while trying to catch up.  On the 
whole, that has not fared well and getting the corrections that have been 
recorded out to the troops has done even worse.  Witness the persistence of 'ro 
broda = ro lo broda', which was not true even while CLL was abuilding, if I 
remember correctly, and certainly hasn't been for a long time since. There are 
many other cases, dipping back into the past muddle about 'lo' (and perhaps the 
other descriptors as well).  The assumption was that that had been resolved by 
xorlo.  But xorlo was itself a conceptual mess for some time, though it finally 
solidified (mainly by dropping some of the "mass" freight it still carried for a 
while),  Now it is in pretty good shape and the problems have shifted into 
another area, collectivity vs distributivity.  


The referent of a descriptive phrase is some things that satisfy the description 
(which ones is contextual).  That a thing is among these things is a 
relationship that is formally identical to the part-whole relationship 
(Lesniewski, Quine, Goodman, Leonard).  Thus, if the things are described as 
people, they have parts, and, since the relation is transitive, they are parts 
of the things referred to by the description.  But they are not among the things 
referred to by the descriptor, since they are not people (the fallacy is NOT 
committed, though some would have it so).  There may be things among those 
described which are among the things describe, the subsets (as it were) and 
their parts are, of course, among the described (though the subsets themselves 
may not be -- fallacy doesn't work either way, contrary to some attempts).  
Similarly,  the referents here may be among some other things and thus satisfy 
the defining description of that group, but that does not mean the larger group 
satisfies the description of the smaller.  In short amongness is separate from 
predication, which has to be decided by the facts.  So the fact that a brain is 
part of a rhinoceros does not mean a rhinoceros is a braid, any more than the 
fact that neurons are part of a brain mean that neurons are a brain (even all 
the ones that are parts of a given brain).

The issue of collectivity (the logical default case) has gotten mixed up with 
ol-timey muddles about masses again.  And, indeed, collectivity does solve one 
issue that was in the "mass" mix.  Or sorta solve it.  In the ever-popular issue 
of "The boys carried the piano", we can now say (well, we really can't 
apparently) that the boys collectively carried the piano, leaving aside issues 
about how the work load was distributed.  We can pry, if we want, but that 
rarely is necessary except for moral or legal cases, where rewards and 
punishments are to be distributed.  But the fact that the boys do something 
collectively does not mean that there is something more than the boys involved 
(their mass or group or set or...); there is just them acting in certain ways, 
ways that happen, on this occasion, to come together to get the piano moved.  
These same boys -- maybe even with the same amount of plannong and cooperation 
-- might wear red ties to school one day, each one individually (it is hard for 
two to wear one tie at the same time).  Of course, they might also be 
collectively staging a protest thereby.  The fact that we have no way to 
indicate that the things are acting collectively (but two ways to show that they 
are acting distributively) is a problem, though xorxes' arguments convince both 
that this concept needs more work and that the solution does not lie in 
descriptors.

On the conceptual level, their are this category errors of saying that the eye 
sees or the brain thinks.  People (and other animals) see and think and so on.  
Brains and eyes are, at best, tools for these activities, even necessary 
conditions, but not the same thing by any means (someone once compared the brain 
and though to the bile duct and bile).  Totally different predicates apply to 
them, since they are, in fact, in different categorical realms.  Attmepts to 
reduce one to the other inevitably flounder on this fact.  Not that this has 
anything to do with the present discussion, unless one want to try and pull some 
sort of fallacy about brains thinking and therefore neurons thinking or some 
strange converse like brains thinking and thus big toes think, since they are 
both parts of one body  (St. Paul!).

Now, can we get back to the issue, whatever it was?  Or has it been resolved by 
careful sorting out?

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