Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 6:06 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> I think I now agree that Carlsonite Kinds are an appropriate way of
> handling {lo'e} and can consistently be allowed as a reading of {lo}.
>
> I do still have a couple of questions about how Kinds should work in
> Lojban.
>
> Firstly: there is the question of whether Kinds are in our domain of
> quantification.

My answer is that sometimes they are and sometimes they are not,
depending on what "our domain of quantification" happens to be at the
time.

> I think the answer has to be no, because it interferes with our usual
> ideas of quantification. For example, if I have two children A and B, it
> seems we would have to admit
>    mi rirni ci da .i je sa'e lo'i se rirni be mi cu du .abu ce by ce lo'e
>        se rirni be mi,
> which is just silly.

Right. Kinds aren't quantified together with their manifestations, and
we rarely want to quantify over kinds of children, and especially in
the panzi rather than the verba sense of "child".

But that doesn't mean we never want to quantify over kinds. We should
be able to say things like "I have two favourite desserts".

> So we have to accept that {lo'e mulna'u du da} and {lo'e pemfinti cu
> finti da poi pemci} are both false. This does seem to agree with English
> bare plurals - "natural numbers are equal to something" and "poets write
> some poems" are both false.

Would you object to "natural numbers are equal to something (namely
themselves)" and "poets write some poems, but most poems are written
by non-poets"? I wouldn't.

> Secondly, there's the simple question of what *is* true of Kinds. This
> doesn't seem to be seriously addressed by Carlson or his progeny, but we
> have to address it.
>
> The non-commutativity example above narrows our options, but I see
> nothing wrong with declaring:
> lo'e broda cu brodi lo'e brodu
> iff
> the set { (x,y) | broda(x) /\ brodu(y) /\ brodi(x,y) } is Large in
> { (x,y) | broda(x) /\ brodu(y) }

But I want to be able to say "dogs have been known to eat carrots"
even when the set { (x,y) | dog(x) /\ carrot(y) /\ eat(x,y) } does not
seem to be Large in { (x,y) | dog(x) /\ carrot(y) }

> where the Large subsets form a contextually defined filter - i.e. the
> intersection of Large and Large is Large, and the empty set is not
> Large.
>
> Working directly with the product like this avoids the non-commutativity
> problems (failure of Fubini).
>
> Some predications will not be assigned a truth value (i.e. we don't
> require the filter to be an ultrafilter); e.g. it would be reasonable
> for {lo'e mulna'u cu mleca lo'e mulna'u} to be neither true nor false.
> Similarly for {lo'e narmecmulna'u}.
>
> It's crucial that brodi was a basic predicate, not something involving
> quantifiers, but that's fine.
>
> Problem: this doesn't give a natural translation of e.g. "poets write
> poems". Under the above semantics, {lo'e pemfinti cu finti lo'e pemci}
> is probably false, and so is {lo'e pemfinti cu finti su'o pemci}. {lo'e
> pemfinti cu ckaji lo ka finti su'o pemci} would be true, but maybe
> that's cheating.
>
> Thoughts?

I think most of the problem is in getting levels of abstraction mixed
up. (And by this I don't mean just two levels of abstraction, concrete
and abstract, but lots and lots of levels with different degree of
abstraction.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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