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Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
Martin Bays, On 14/10/2011 23:59:
* Friday, 2011-10-14 at 11:39 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>:
Martin Bays, On 13/10/2011 05:33:
To take a simple example: when the {lo} is read generically, what does
{lo remna cu prami ri} mean? There are two obvious possibilities
- "humans love humans" (both generic) and "humans love themselves". The
first is natural only if we admit kinds.
The debate may have moved on, but back in the day, I'd have understood
it to mean "the human loves themself" (or, equivalently, "the human
loves the human", just as "John loves himself" and "John loves John"
are equivalent in logic or Lojban), i.e. a reading in which the two
obvious possibilities you mention are in fact nondistinct (because
there's only one human). It's true that, given that "the human loves
themself", one is unsure whether one should infer that "humans loves
humans" or that "humans love themselves", but that is a metaphysical
matter rather than a linguistic one, and hence not something for
Lojban or Lojbanology to address.
So this seems to coincide with my understanding of xorxes' approach.
Kinds are possible elements of our domain; whether a kind satisfies
a predicate is often eventually determined by the predicates satisfied
by the corresponding mundane individuals, but what that relation is
varies from predicate to predicate, and is considered part of the
lexicon.
I agree that this is internally consistent, but I remain averse to it
for some reasons I'll try to (re)summarise:
(i) Although we can leave it to the lexicon in the first instance, the
fact remains that in natural languages kind predication often resolves
to existential or generic predication over corresponding mundane
individuals.
That's debatable. In the context of the present discussion, xorlo Lojban strikes me as no different from natural languages. (OK, the only natlang I know at all well is English, so I will instead limit myself to saying "no different from English".)
Presumably the same would hold for kinds in lojban. But
once we perform this resolution to the level of mundanes, we find that
different interpretations of {lo} resolve to different logical forms.
For example, {na ku lo cinfo cu zvati lo mi purdi} has at least the two
following meanings in terms of actual lions:
1. {lo cinfo} is interpreted as a plurality of mundane lions, giving
roughly:
For L some (contextually relevant) lions: \not in(L, my garden)
(which probably means that there exists a lion among L which is not in
my garden)
2. {lo cinfo} is interpreted as the kind Lions, giving
\not in(Lions, my garden)
which is then resolved existentially, giving
\not \exists l:lion(l). in(l, my garden) .
So subtleties aside, we have a straightforward ambiguity between
\exists l:lion(l). \not in(l, my garden)
and
\not \exists l:lion(l). in(l, my garden) .
This seems toljbo to me.
But for any X, "it is not the case that X is in my garden" is no more and no less ambiguous, whether X is lionkind, or water, or Barack Obama. Just replace "lion" in your formulas by "water" or "Barack Obama". I'm not taking a view about whether they actually are ambiguous; I merely assert that kinds behave no differently from any other individuals. (Cf "Barack Obama has not been in my garden", "Barack Obama has been not in my garden".)
The choice of whether to view something as an individual whole or as a generalization over its subtypes exists for all or most sorts of things, not just genericizations of countable things. And the exercising of that choice is metaphysical rather than linguistic. Lojban is metaphysically neutral.
Worse, we have no obvious way to disambiguate to case 1 (with its
subtleties included).
If it's a problem, it's not a problem specific to kinds or to {lo}.
(ii) kinds and mundanes intefere when they are both in the universe, in
a way they don't in natural languages.
I don't see any difference between xorlo Lojban and natural languages. But admittedly, I may have overlooked evidence you have presented earlier in this long thread.
That's because we refer to
individuals by their properties rather than having nouns, so if
brodakind brodas then, according to the usual rules, {su'o broda} and
{da poi broda} can pick up brodakind. One fix for this is to have the
universe snap to one which excludes mundane brodas when we want to talk
about brodakind - but that's so dramatically inconsistent with the kind
of semantics I'd expect a logical language to have that I have trouble
even taking it seriously, still less imagining how it would work.
An alternative is simply to declare that these constructions *don't*
pick up kinds; but this doesn't smell all that much less like a hack
than the domain-switching approach, and it does block direct
translations of natural language constructions like "there are two
whales in this sea - the killer whale and the hump-backed whale", or
xorxes' "humans have two legs - the right leg and the left leg".
It's no business of the language's to take a view how many whales or legs or brodas there are. There might be one, or two, or zillions. So the domain-switching approach seems to me to be entirely correct.
On this view, the referent of {lo} is not semantically encoded as being a generalization over subtypes, and if for you a 'kind' is intrinsically a generalization over subtypes, then it is better to talk of domain-switching rather than kinds. I don't know how you would make explicit reference to generalizations over subtypes -- maybe lo'e & le'e? -- and doubtless those would run into the sort of problems with ambiguity that you have imputed to {lo}.
(iii) I don't believe that it's obvious from the gimste or dictionary
efforts what the meanings of selbri are when applied to kinds. For
example, I think xorxes claimed that when {nelci} has a kind in x2, it's
gives a pure-kind predication like that of the english "I like dogs",
and never has a generic or existential meaning. Is this information
really something you can glean from the gimste definition of {nelci}?
I must have been inattentive at that point of your discussion, so I can't comment on the claim you attribute to xorxes. For my part, I'd say that the meaning of "nelci X" is oblivious to whether X is lo or le or la. To like lo gerku is no different from liking la martin.
--And.
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