Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Wed, Aug 24, 2011 at 12:41 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> * Tuesday, 2011-08-23 at 22:04 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>>
>> 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}.

Yes... but only when "namcu" is predicated of the members of the set
{integers, rationals, reals, ...}, not when it is predicated of the
members of {0, 1, 2, ...}

> 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.

"ro da poi mulna'u" strongly suggests a context where there are many
integers (infinitely many, of course), not a context where integers
are just one kind of numbers. In the latter context (a strange context
because we don't usually apply the universal quantifier over singleton
sets) what you have there is false.

> 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.

In my understanding, "lo broda" has a single referent in such cases.

> 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,

I would say "natural numbers are smaller than natural numbers" is
questionable at least, but easily fixed to: "natural numbers are
smaller than other natural numbers". But then "natural numbers" and
"other natural numbers" are not the same individual, and the second
one is in some sense a derivative of the first.

> 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...

I would say "other natural numbers are larger than natural numbers" is
fine as a restatement of "natural numbers are smaller than other
natural numbers". Just slightly unusual because "other" has to look
forward to determine other than what, but still acceptable.

> (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?

Not really mine. Are you familiar with Carlson's "A Unified Analysis
of the English Bare Plural"? I'm sure there must be more modern
analysis of generic terms, but I like that one very much.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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