Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Sep 13, 2011 at 11:40 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> * Monday, 2011-09-12 at 23:22 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>>
>> How is "John smokes and was born in London" different from "chihuahuas
>> are fiercely loyal and may have originated in Mexico"?
>>
>> I don't see a good reason to accept one but not the other.
>
> We can analyse the generic sentences like this (as in Chierchia98, p.366):
>
> "John smokes" -> for generic relevant situations s, John smokes in s

I would suggest -> for generic relevant situations s, John is smoking in s

otherwise you are explaining "John smokes" in terms of "John smokes" again.

"John is smoking" is something more concrete than "John smokes". You
can for example see whether John is smoking or not in a given
situation, but you can only infer whether he smokes or not. Seeing
just one situation where he is smoking may not be enough to conclude
that he smokes.

> "chihuahuas are fiercely loyal" -> for generic relevant situations s and
> chihuahuas x, x is fiercely loyal in s.
>
> (here 'situation' could mean co-ordinates with respect to possible
> worlds and time)

I was thinking of being fiercely loyal as not a situational property
but as something more intrinsic. If you think of being loyal as
something situational, change the example to something intrinsic, say
"chihuahuas are between six and ten inches tall". Then the
corresponding expansion would be something like:

for generic relevant instances i, chihuahuas are between six and ten
inches tall in instance i.

In a given instance, there is only one (relevant)
chihuahua-manifestation, just as in a given situation there is only
one (relevant) John-stage.

"This chihuahua here is between six and ten inches" is again much more
concrete than "chihuahuas are between six and ten inches". You can
only infer the latter one from enough relevant instances of the
former.

The analogy (and remember it's just an analogy, I'm not saying "John"
and "chihuahuas" are the exact same type of thing!) is between
John/stages-of-John and chihuahuas/manifestations-of-chihuahuas. A
manifestation is itself an individual that can have its stages, but
that's a different further breakdown.

> In both cases, I think we should analyse (both in english and in lojban)
> the genericity over situations as being located in the predicate.

But I was comparing the genericity of situations for John with the
genericity of instances for chihuahuas.

> In lojban, we could make it explicit with something like
> {na'o so'e mu'ei}
> (although a single cmavo for it would be better... I note that {na'oi}
> appears to be free)
>
> For John, there's nothing left to explain. For chihuahuas, we still have
> the genericity over them to explain. For English, Chierchia98 talks
> about "accommodation" and type-casting to get chihuahuas into the
> generic quantifier. I don't see why we have to copy that.

There's only one genericity to explain if you consider intrinsic
properties of chihuahuas.

In any case, the point was that John remains John whether we consider
his situational properties or his non-situational properties, and
similarly we don't really need to have two different chihuahuas, the
kind and the generic. It's their properties that can be classified as
kind-properties and generic-properties.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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