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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 19, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> In "I am in my garden", the world is specified. So the sentence is true
> iff it holds of the referent of 'I' that it is, in that world, in my
> garden. Nothing else concerning 'I' is involved.
>
> The same goes for the lions, except that there are likely many lions in
> the specified world.

By "world" do you mean "domain of discourse"? How is it specified? It
seems that there are likely many lion manifestations just as there are
likely many stages of me in our world. From a metaphysical perspective
it is hard to think of lions without lion manifestations, but it is
just as hard to think of me without stages of me. If there is a
preference for domains of discourse with many lion manifestations over
domains of discourse with many stages of me it does not seem to come
from any formal law of language.


>> It just says that if my garden is being ruined, it must be by
>> something other than lions, or that if lions are ruining something, it
>> must be something other than my garden, or if lions are doing
>> something to my garden, it must be something other than ruining it,
>> and so on. You may infer from it that no lion is ruining my garden,
>> but that's not what it means.
>
> Ah, or is it that you're introducing something too subtle for me to
> understand? Are you considering as part of the meaning of a sentence
> something other than its truth conditions? i.e. would you agree that the
> converse of the inference you just accepted is also valid?

We've discussed this kind of inference, that involves changing the
domain of discourse. That's the only subtlety I mean to introduce: in
the original domain of discourse there weren't any lion
manifestations, and so no logical inference to something involving
such things would be possible. But... we can easily change the domain
of discourse and then the sentence about lion manifestations would be
true. But this is not a logical inference, it's a change to a new
model of the world:

 lo cinfo cu daspo lo mi purdi .i sa'e su'o cinfo cu daspo lo mi purdi
 "Lions are destroying my garden. More precisely, some lions are
destroying my garden."

The second sentence just uses a more fine-grained model of the world.

>> I don't want to introduce at any point an existential claim about
>> individual lions. (If you do, you must then make exceptions for
>> intensional contexts.)
>
> What do you mean?
>
> (I fear I know what you mean, but I'm hoping I'm wrong.)

"I am hunting lions" can be true even if there is no lion
manifestation such that I am hunting it.

Somewhat analogously, "I sell books" could be true even if there is no
stage of me that has ever sold a book.


> So it does seem that the ontology Chierchia presents in my favourite
> paper does fit rather well with your {lo} - you have it always giving
> a Skolem function with values in that universe.
>
> Similarly for {zo'e}.
>
> Correct?

I'm still reading the paper, so I'm not sure I can say much yet.
Chierchia starts by classifying languages into three groups: [+arg,
-pred] (Chinese), [-arg, +pred] (Romance) and [+arg, +pred] (Germanic,
Slavic). As far as I can tell, Lojban should fall flatly with the
Romance languages in this classification, since whatever syntactic
nouns it may be said to have are exclusively predicative. On the other
hand, Lojban has no plurals, which makes it more like Chinese in that
respect.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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