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

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

No classifiers because Lojban (in keeping with its SAE status) is rigorously 
count.  In fact, one ongoing problem in Lojban has been how to get mass terms in 
where they are "necessary" (so much, again for S-WH).  L-sets help a bit.  It's 
not clear that kinds do.




----- Original Message ----
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, September 19, 2011 10:46:40 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

* Monday, 2011-09-19 at 21:28 -0300 - 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"?

Ah, yes, I should define my terms.

I'm assuming by now a semantics along the lines of that used in Montague
grammar (and, if I understand correctly, essentially all subsequent work
in formal semantics), basically being Kripke semantics. See section 2 of
Montague's "The Proper Treatment Of Quantification in Ordinary English"
(which at the time of writing can be found here:
www.blackwellpublishing.com/content/BPL_Images/Content_store/Sample_chapter/0631215417%5CPortner.pdf

) for details, but to quickly outline (to fix notation, and for the
benefit of any readers not familiar with it): our model consists of
a universe aka domain of discourse, and a set of possible worlds and
a set of temporal instants. Then e.g. a predicate P is 'really'
a function from possible-world+time coordinates w - which for short (and
because we don't necessarily want to tie ourselves too closely to this
treatment of tenses) I've just been terming 'worlds', and which
Chierchia calls 'situations' - to predicates in the usual sense on the
universe (i.e. functions from some power of the universe to
{True,False}); we can write this latter predicate P_w.

Similarly, the interpretation of e.g. 'Alice' is the function which
given a world, picks out the element Alice_w in that world. (We might,
as Montague does, ask that this be the *same* element each time, but I'm
not sure that's really important.)

The intention then is that we interpret a sentence in a fixed such
model, this being a recursive process which involves interpreting
subformulas in the same model.


So anyway: by "there are many lions in the specified world", I meant
that many elements of the universe satisfy the unary predicate lions_w,
where w is the world indicated by the context - whose co-ordinates were
(this actual possible world, now).


> 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.

I'm afraid the idea of 'stages of me' being things in the domain of
discourse doesn't seem to fit in this framework. We have me_w for
various w, which might correspond to whatever it is you mean by
a stage, but we have one for each w.

> >> 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.

Right, yes. I had forgotten about this.

It seems severely unnatural to me to have a domain of discourse which
contains lionkind but no lions.

It also screws with Chierchia's definition of kinds.

The problems with counting and so on which arise when we mix kinds and
instances could be rectified by simply declaring that {da} and
{[quantifier] [selbri]} never get kinds - i.e. the corresponding
variables are over 'mundane' singular objects (AT minus K, in
Chierchia's notation).

I suggested something like this before, and I think you complained that
we shouldn't be separating out kinds from mundanes... but since
Chierchia does it, I feel licensed to push again for an explanation of
what would go so wrong if we did separate them out.

> >> 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.

That isn't what I feared. Phew.

I don't see an exception here. 'lions' there still involves an
existential. In the notation above, I think it's
I_w hunt_w (\lambda w. \exists l. lions_w(l)) .

> > 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.

I think so, to the extent this classification applies at all... but
with the exception of cmene, we don't really have nouns or noun phrases
at all. We're just weird.

> On the other hand, Lojban has no plurals, which makes it more like
> Chinese in that respect.

But no classifiers. Very weird ;)

Martin

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