Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 8:19 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> * Thursday, 2011-08-25 at 19:11 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>> On Thu, Aug 25, 2011 at 6:06 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > 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.
>
> Meaning that quantification can be over ordinary individuals, and it can
> be over Kinds, but it can't be over a mixture of the two?

Not exactly. I think kinds are just as ordinary as any other
individual. It's not a binary distinction.

> So our
> universe has multiple sorts, and {ro da} can be quantifying over any one
> of them - but only one at a time? I'd be happy with that, and it seems
> to deal with your "two favourite desserts" issue.
>
> It would be nice to have a way of explicitly indicating that
> quantification is over usual individuals and not Kinds.

But "usual individuals" is just whatever can be the value or values of
a variable. In some contexts there is and can be one and only one
letter "e". In some other contexts there can be two and only two
(written "e" and "E".) In other contexts there can be many, but such
that there are only two in the word "letter". Even if I write "letter"
and "letter" twice, that one word has two "e"'s. But then in another
context, when it's two words that I wrote, there are four "e"'s that I
wrote. And perhaps if we count not just the two words I wrote but the
(tens? hundreds?) of computer screens those words I wrote have
appeared in, we may have to admit that there are hundreds of 'e's that
have been read. I don't see how we can reduce all that to just two
levels.

> I'd say that {da
> poi du} would do that (or {da poi zilmintu} if we want {du} to be
> magic), as long as we ignore Kinds made from singletons.

I'm not sure it's such a good idea to think of kinds as being made of
something.

> You mention below "[not] just two levels of abstraction, concrete and
> abstract, but lots and lots of levels with different degree of
> abstraction"; could this mean more sorts? If so, what are you thinking
> of? I guess you could have Kinds of Kinds, though maybe that's more
> trouble than it's worth...

It may be trouble, but I think it's inevitable. I think making
generalizations and particularizations is an ordinary part of
language, and it is not limited to two levels.

>> Would you object to "natural numbers are equal to something (namely
>> themselves)"
>
> No, but I don't see how to analyse it with generics - I'd say that's
> a clear case of quantification, i.e. that it's
> {ro da poi mulna'u cu du de ne da}.

You don't agree with Carlson's analysis of the English bare plural
then. I think he presents a very good argument that a unified analysis
makes more sense than thinking that it is sometimes the plural of
"a(n)" and sometimes a universal/generic.

> You can't say
> "something (namely themselves) is/are equal to natural numbers"

How about "One thing are natural numbers and some other thing are
rational numbers".

> (the problem isn't the pronoun position - you can say
> "something (namely itself) is equal to any natural number"
> )

I think "something is/are natural numbers" is weird due to the
difficulty in making any sense of why someone would want to say
something like that. "Something is a dog" is almost as strange, and
there we don't have to fight against the plural morphology.

>> and "poets write some poems, but most poems are written by non-poets"?
>
> I don't think 'poets' is a generic there, any more than 'non-poets' is.

Carlson would disagree. (Or rather,I think he would say that bare
plurals are always the same thing, I'm not sure he would call it a
generic.)

>> 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) }
>
> Again, I don't think 'carrots' is a generic there.
>
> Actually, doesn't it just mean
> {se zgana lo nu su'o gerku su'o najgenja cu citka}?
> If not, what did you mean by it and how would you like to Lojbanise it?

Maybe something along the lines of:

va'o su'o da lo gerku cu citka lo najgenka
"Under some circumstances, dogs will eat carrots."

Much like:

va'o du'o da la djan tavla la alis
"Under some circumstances, John will talk to Alice."

I would not bring in time slices of John and time slices of Alice in
order to interpret that sentence.

> More generally, could you indicate (however vaguely) what you think the
> truth conditions for {lo'e broda lo'e brodi cu brodu} should be?

I'm not really sure about "lo'e", but for "lo broda lo brodi cu
brodu", just the same as for any other "ko'a ko'e broda". I just don't
think that "lo broda" fixes by itself any level of abstraction.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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