* Tuesday, 2011-08-23 at 22:04 -0300 - 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.
If that's all you mean, then fine. I was implicitly working under the
simplifying assumption of a fixed domain of discourse. Given your
example below, I think you mean a bit more than that - but I think it's
still fine (see below).
> > 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.
Yes. I'm not convinced by this argument - I would be happy to sacrifice
brevity for simpler semantics. But actually, having thought about it,
I don't see a wholly satisfactory alternative to plural predication.
I can't see a way to use distributive predication and
groups-as-individuals which doesn't end up being either painfully less
expressive or more conceptually complicated.
> 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).
Right. I've avoided mentioning these things, not wanting to take too
much mud with the water sample, but since you bring them up...
I don't think generics can be treated as individuals on par with the
other individuals in our universe.
Indeed, we would then have to have
{lo'e mulna'u cu du da poi namcu}.
But since generics are generic, we would also have
{ro da poi mulna'u zo'u lo'e namcu cu na du da},
a contradiction.
So I don't see that {lo broda} can be interpreted as a generic while
holding on to the idea that the interpretation of {lo broda} is
determined by its set of referents.
I think {lo'e broda} has to be read as introducing a quantifier:
{lo'e broda cu brode} -> "for x a generic broda: brode(x)"
(the semantics of this quantifier being hazy and context-dependent).
Note also that two such quantifiers generally won't commute (e.g.
for generic natural numbers n: for generic natural numbers m: n<m
holds, but
for generic natural numbers m: for generic natural numbers n: n<m
does not), so if {lo'e broda} is allowed as a meaning for {lo broda}
then the idea that {lo broda} should be immune to scope issues has to be
dropped too...
(Assuming scoping works as with other quantifiers, we'd have
{lo'e narmecmulna'u lo'e narmecmulna'u cu mleca} but not
{lo'e narmecmulna'u lo'e narmecmulna'u cu se mleca}.)
Do you have a cunning way out of this?
> > 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.
Yes. That's an ambiguous predicate, and context disambiguates. I don't
think we have an actual disagreement here, beyond terminology - unless
you would want to allow a Lojbanic equivalent of "There are six letters
in 'letter', but 26 of them in the English alphabet". But I doubt you
do.
(Not rendering into Lojban, because I wouldn't actually want to use
lerfu for the first meaning, as opposed to {lerfu nilcla} or similar...
but that's irrelevant - selbri necessarily are quite ambiguous in
general, and of course context helps disambiguate)
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