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

["John E. Clifford" <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Oh dear, now I am worried.  Nothing here sounds as crazy as some of the remarks flying around earlier seemed to sound.  The only problem left is that of having either generic chihuahuas or chihuahuakind in addition to or instead of chihuahuas. I think the point about different tests pretty well covers the situation (though I doubt such tests are often performed or could be normalized).  And placing the indicators in the predicate structure seems right to me (although some approximations seem to turn up among quantifiers -- but these don't spread out at all).

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 14, 2011, at 18:13, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> 
> -- 
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
> To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
> 

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.