Re: [lojban] xorlo and masses

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 4:53 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Fragments of it are easy enough to treat - in particular, a sizable
> fragment translates directly to usual first-order predicate logic.

Yes, and while the collective/distributive issue is not so easy to
treat in the usual (singular) first-order predicate logic, the issue
of generics is much simpler in that respect, as long as we keep the
domain of discourse restricted to what is relevant.

> Pre-xorlo, {lo} was part of that fragment. I'd like to understand what
> modifications to the semantics are required to handle xor{lo}.

Pre-xorlo "lo" was just a synonym of "su'o". There's not much point in
having two words for the same quantifier. xorlo "lo" is not a
quantifier, rather what it does is create a referring expression out
of a predicate, and the only requirement is that the referent(s) of
that expression satisfy that predicate.   But what those referrents
are will change from context to context. In some contexts the
referrents of "lo gerku" will be some particular dog or dogs, in some
other context it will be something like the single referrent of the
English "dogs". That has no effect on first-order predicate logic.
From the point of view of first-order predicate logic, all we have in
"lo gerku" is a constant.

> But what I meant was that you seemed to be upsetting the very
> foundations of a model-theoretic formal semantics - that we can judge
> truthhood of statements against a fixed model (fixed at least
> throughout a sentence, whether or not throughout the whole discourse).
>
> I hope this isn't necessary.

I don't think I'm doing that, at least not with respect to this issue
of generics.

>> >> And this works because, as Carlson points out, bare plurals are never
>> >> actually ambiguous as to what reading they should be given. The
>> >> predicate normally selects for which reading is the one called for,
>> >> and when it doesn't it's because the predicate itself is ambiguous, as
>> >> can be shown with the same predicate acting on non-bare plural
>> >> arguments.
>> >
>> > Yes, but you don't want this to translate directly to Lojban, do you?
>>
>> I'm not sure I follow what you mean by "this" here.
>
> The ambiguity being in the predicate rather than the sumti.

The type of ambiguous predicates I was thinking about were things like
Carlson's example "... ate figs" (he used some other food item, but I
don't recall what now) which has the two possible readings for bare
plural subjects in English, but it also has the two readings for an
ordinary subject like "John", so it doesn't make sense to attribute
the ambiguity to the bare plural, unless you want to say that "John"
is also ambiguous in the relevant sense. In Lojban the disambiguation
could be something like "...pu ta'e citka lo figre" vs. "... pu co'i
citka lo figre".  Plain "citka lo figre" would probably have to remain
ambiguous between at least those two.

>> My Lojban translation for "poets write some poems, but most poems are
>> written by non-poets" might be something like: "lo pemfi'i cu finti
>> su'o pemci .i ku'i so'e pemci cu se finti lo na'e pemfi'i"
>
> Right. So that wouldn't work with lo giving 'the typical', nor with it
> giving some individuals as a constant - so this kind of Kind really is
> something new. And its semantics are only getting more and more alien to
> me as you give more examples...

What I'm saying is that it's (similar to) the usual semantics of the
English bare plural, at least as analysed by Carlson. In our domain of
dioscourse we have one element (poets), another element (non-poets),
and some indefinite number of other elements, each of which is a poem,
and we claim that poets write some poems, and non-poets write most
poems. Nothing deeper than that.

The problem (if it's a problem) is when you try to connect this with a
different domain of discourse which contains many people each of which
is either a poet or a non-poet. But that's a different domain of
discourse, not the one we need to interpret this sentence. The
relationship that holds between an individual like "poets" and the
many individuals each of which is a poet, when they occur in the same
domain of discourse, does have its complications. But it's not like we
are deviating from first-order predicate logic when we consider the
simpler domain where "poets" has a single referent, who happens to
write some but not most poems.

> For a while, I thought your generics might be something like elements in
> an elementary extension, i.e. that adding them doesn't change the truth
> value of any sentence (or maybe: of any sentence which is short enough
> and doesn't use any too high numbers (so we can add generics to large
> finite sets)).

No, we don't add generics to sets. When we have a generic, it will
typically be the only member of "its set".

> But now it seems you would want that {ro pemci cu se finti lo finti}. So
> {da finti ro pemci} becomes true on adding this generic.

Yes, as long as we don't shift to a domain of discourse where we have
more than the generic "authors". If you are going to go down that
road, it would make more sense to start with "ro pemci cu se finti
su'o finti", which of course does not license "su'o finti cu finti ro
pemci"..

>> > Or if you don't believe in {lo'e}, make the question: could {lo gerku cu
>> > cmalu gi'e xagji} be translated as "dogs are small and some dogs are
>> > hungry"?
>>
>> I don't think so, where would the "some" have come from? It would have
>> to be one of the options in: "(The) dog(s) is/are/(was/were/...) small
>> and hungry".
>
> Probably I should have said "dogs are small and the dogs are hungry".
> This isn't in your list of possibilities. Just to check - was that
> deliberate?

Yes, the x1 of "cmalu" and the x1 of "xagji" in "lo gerku cu cmalu
gi'e xagji" has to be the same, and in "dogs are small and the dogs
are hungry" you are changing subjects. "Dogs are small and they are
hungry" would work.


> Do you mean that there are *two ways* in which {lo plise cu farlu} could
> be analysed as saying that some (particular) apples are falling - the
> first being where {lo plise} is read as referring to some apples and
> {farlu} as a distributive predicate, and the second being where {lo
> plise} is read as a generic, and {farlu} is read as applying to some
> stages of this generic?

"lo plise cu farlu" could mean "apples fall" or "apples are falling",
yes (among other things). One way of disambiguating would be "lo plise
cu ta'e farlu" vs "lo plise cu ca'o farlu", i.e. by making the
predicate, rather than its argument, more explicit.

> Or do you want to combine these two into one? Perhaps with lo *always*
> returning a generic?

I think that woldn't work in general, but for out-of-the-blue
sentences without any context, it seems that the generic is the most
natural way to go.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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