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

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

All this talk about generic properties and situations and quantifiers needs some unpacking for me.  I assume something subjunctive (and thus subjective) is going on here, but it is not clear what.  What does this have to do with chihuahuas or John?

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 15, 2011, at 20:19, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * Wednesday, 2011-09-14 at 19:13 -0300 - 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.
> 
> Quite right.
> 
>> 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.
> 
> Fine. I agree that there's an analogy. But since the generic quantifier
> is over quite different things (situations vs instances*), it seems
> entirely coherent to deal with them in different ways.
> 
> Martin
> 
> *(allowing that it makes sense to quantify over instances without
> touching situations (i.e. "in intension")... which it seems formally
> would mean introducing constants for every chihuahua... but I'm happy to
> ignore that as a technicality)

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