Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Aug 23, 2011 at 8:04 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> You seem to want contextually dependent atoms; do you correspondingly
> want contextually dependent individuals? (see also below)

Yes, what counts as a member of the domain of discourse has to be part
of the context.

> For whatever record, I feel I should point out that I'm not actually yet
> convinced that introducing plural reference (/Wholes) was ever a good
> idea, i.e. an improvement on having always-distributive predicates with
> groups-as-individuals to substitute for collective predication. Do you
> have any killer argument for that?

If we want to be able to say things like "they were wearing red caps
while surrounding the building", then either there's non-distributive
predication over "them", or "they" is a very weird many-headed
individual. If you allow this kind of individual into the domain of
discourse, how do you count the cap-wearers? Are there n, with n being
the number of people, or is there a much larger number of cap-wearers,
including the largest one that surrounds the building?

The alternative is to make saying things like the above impossible,
and having to always say something like "each of them was wearing a
red cap while 'the group having each of them and nobody else as a
member' surrounded the building", presumably with some shortcut form
for all that mouthful (like "lo'u"). But you would need to split it
into two sentences, you couldn't have two such predicates sharing the
same argument.

Groups as individuals are still fine in many contexts, and sometiimes
we do want to count groups, but not in every context. Sometimes we
don't want to say anything about a group but still want to say things
about its members non-distributively.

>> > How, without invoking absolute atoms, can you give a meaning to
>> > {ro ko'a broda} based only on the Whole [ko'a] and on the meaning of
>> > {broda}?
>>
>> I agree that we end up invoking atoms, but maybe we mean different
>> things by "absolute atoms". In some (many) contexts the atoms will be
>> people, in other contexts they may be human scale "dacti", and so on.
>> And these atoms can change from sentence to sentence, and perhaps even
>> from reference to reference in the same sentence. What we probably
>> don't need is context independent absolute atoms. Once we have settled
>> on an interpretation, then we do have absolute atoms for that
>> interpretation, but there's no guarantee that the next sentence won't
>> bring up the need to reassess what the "absolute" atoms are.
>
> I don't see that this presents a problem for the "absolute atom"
> approach.
>
> It does if the 'part of' (aka 'among') relation is considered to have
> anything to do with the world model, e.g. a limb being part of its owner
> or a drop being part of an ocean, so perhaps the mereological
> terminology is misleading. I'll switch to plural reference, where the
> question is whether we can have a context-independent notion of
> individual. (To be clear: here I am understanding 'plural reference' and
> 'individual' to mean that any term is interpreted as having
> a referent-set which is a set of individuals.)

For me the strongest argument for context dependent individuals comes
not so much from all this distributivity issue but from kinds/generic
reference (bare plurals in English).

> Now prenu and dacti and nu broda and so on are all individuals. So {lo
> broda} can have any of them as referents, as long as they broda; which
> of them it does is of course context-dependent.
>
> So in other words: I don't see why the reassessment you mention can't
> just be of what the referents of this next instance of {lo broda} should
> be, rather than of what counts as an individual.

What counts as an individual letter in "there are five letters in the
word 'letter'" is not the same as what counts as an individual letter
in "there are 26 letters in the English alphabet", agreed? Either "e"
and "e" are sometimes one letter and sometimes two letters, but they
are always letters, or they are one letter_1 and two letter_2 and a
predicate such as "is a letter" is ambiguous. Maybe you prefer this
view, what counts as an individual is always fixed, but it is the
meaning of predicates such as "is a letter" that changes with context.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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