* Tuesday, 2011-09-27 at 18:56 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>: > On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:46 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote: > > Is the analogy > > then meant to be: > > > > stages <-~-> manifestations > > individuals <-~-> kinds > > time <-~-> space-time > > > > ? > > Right. > > > If so, I don't think that really works - it's actual lions which > > satisfy predicates at specific points of space-time, not Lion. > > So when you wrote: "Would you even agree that, in the case that we > have a predication > P(k1,k2) about kinds k1, k2 [...]" you didn't really mean to say that > it was k1 and k2 that satisfy the predicate P? I did mean to say that. What I meant by > > it's actual lions which satisfy predicates at specific points of > > space-time, not Lion. was that Lion satisfies a pure-kind predicate at all points of space-time or none. With resolution as existential quantification in the picture, that's admittedly no longer true. So I think I now see what you're getting at. A predication involving a kind sometimes resolves as a predication about manifestations, and correspondingly, were we to have both John-stages and an individual John, we could say that predications involving John sometimes resolve to predications about John-stages. Fair enough. > (Minor sidetrack: we don't call the kind in question "Lion" in > English, except maybe in some children story. Normally we call it > "lions", "the lion" or even "a lion". Yeah, but we need some unambiguous way to refer to the kind when discussing it... just using 'lions' or similar leads to confusion, at least for me. > The only examples I can think of of bare singular count nouns that > could be said to name kinds in English are the names of the months and > of the seasons, as in "September has thirty days", which can be > "universally resolved" in terms of manifestations into "every > September has thirty days". Would you not agree that it can be the > kind September that satisfies "... has thirty days" every year, as > well as seeing it as a different manifestation of September that > satisfies it each year? Tricky! I can't deny that English treats September as an abstract entity, as well as denoting specific months, and uses verbs which aren't innately kind-selecting to talk about it. It also seems that phrases like "September has 30 days" or "humans have two legs", although not pure-kind predications, have more to them than just simple universal or generic quantification - they contain some idea that these properties are part of the concept of September/humanity. Maybe generic quantification + evidentials would be the best way to handle this in lojban? > ) Martin
Attachment:
pgpFpDvI63ea8.pgp
Description: PGP signature