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

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

Another ahah moment.  This talk of donkey sentences (which I have to say I never quite saw the problem with, since the cases where "a" was universal always seemed to me to fall into a small set of types -- but I never pursued that much), called to mind Hans Kamp's discourse analysis and the floating referents and that dodge around quantifiers, which seems a bit like your short domain particulars.  They simply arise and then are left behind or are identified with something already in the pot.  The trouble comes when we shift back into FOL and something has to be done with them -- that is we have the problem of reconciling the speaker's representation with the hearer's through the medium of the language used.  While the speaker has no problem rolling all these objects -- old ones, deictic ones, indifferent ones and particularized variables -- into gaps, the hearer does not sort them out again with e same ease.
As for kinds, I still don't see a reason to change my view that kinds are just maximal bunches and that the various descents to individuals are dealt with by various ways predicates may be predicated of such bunches.  In the raw {no ku lo cinfo cu zvati le mi purdi}, it seems clear that "in" is predicated of a bunch of lions conjunctively or disjunctively, though collectively would make sense in special cases. So you end up with either "Some of the lions aren't in my garden" or "None of the lions are in my garden".  There is, of course, all the changes that could then be rung using generality of various sorts, but that isn't the problem here, is it?
Something similar happens with {lo remna cu prami ri}, where subject and object refer to the same bunch, but the ivities of the two references can vary all over the place.

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 14, 2011, at 18:59, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * 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. 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.
> 
> Worse, we have no obvious way to disambiguate to case 1 (with its
> subtleties included).
> 
> (ii) kinds and mundanes intefere when they are both in the universe, in
> a way they don't in natural languages. 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".
> 
> (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}?
> 
>>> (For nastier a example, consider the apparently classic {ro te cange poi
>>> ponse lo xasli cu darxi ri}... although I'd be happy simply considering
>>> this to be meaningless)
>> 
>> Do you mean the Lojban is meaningless, because of the inadequacy of
>> the rules for identifying and interpreting the antecedent of {ri} (in
>> which case I'm sure you're right)?
> 
> I did mean that.
> 
> (Although I realised that there is probably a mistake in the lojban
> there - isn't what I wrote equivalent to {ro da poi te cange poi ponse
> lo xaslu cu darxi da}? Anyway, replace with {goi ko'a} as required)
> 
>> The proposition intended by donkey sentences is easy to grasp, and
>> pretty commonplace, but hard to formulate in ordinary logic; a logical
>> language should find a way to render the proposition into logic and
>> express it succinctly.
> 
> Yes.
> 
> Martin

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