* Saturday, 2011-10-15 at 01:49 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com>:
> 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:
> > I agree that [having kinds as possible referents of {lo}] 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.
I don't see the english as being relevantly ambiguous in any of those
three cases. "It is not the case that lions are in my garden" means "no
lions are in my garden" (or possibly "at most one lion is in my
garden").
> Just replace "lion" in your formulas by "water" or "Barack Obama".
And in my understanding of lojban, the Obama case is unambiguous (at
least once you specify tense).
Maybe you're making the point xorxes made, that we can have
"Obama-stages" as individuals in our universe as well as having Obama
there, and then we get similar ambiguities when talking about Obama.
This seems to me a good reason not to have Obama-stages!
> 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.
Could you explain what you mean by "generalization over subtypes"?
> And the exercising of that choice is metaphysical rather than
> linguistic. Lojban is metaphysically neutral.
But the definition of xor{lo} is such that the existence of kinds is
required to make sense of many statements which are, in the final
analysis, about mundanes. So the metaphysics (if that's what it is) is
more-or-less hardwired into the language.
To cross-pollinate threadstrands, an example would be
{ro te cange cu na ponse lo xasli}
which with kinds can mean the same thing as
{ro te cange cu na ponse su'o xasli}
, but can't without them. See also the discussion over there of
{ro te cange poi ponse lo xasli cu darxi ri}, xorxes' analysis of which
requires going via kinds to get the right statement about mundanes.
> > 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}.
Do you seriously not consider such undisambiguable ambiguity a problem?
I don't see that this problem comes up if we don't have kinds or stages.
> > (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.
I think that in English, if I say "every whale is a mammal", I'm
either saying that every mundane whale is, or that every whale-kind
(amongst some glorked kinds - probably: every species) is; but I can't
be making both statements at once - not because there's some
domain-switching going on, but just because 'whale' is here ambiguous
between mundane whales and kinds. In lojban, our closest equivalent is
"ro da poi danlr,uail" - which naively would include both whales and
whalekinds.
> >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}.
Again, I'm not sure what you mean by 'generalizations over subtypes'.
I would hope that {lo'e} could be used (perhaps (optionally?) along with
appropriate tenses) to unambiguously give the generic meaning that kinds
apparently sometimes have; but I don't have a good idea on how this
would work.
> > (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.
Well, liking dogs is quite different from liking Fido, and also
different from liking almost all dogs, and from there being a high
probability that you would (come to) like a randomly chosen dog you were
presented with, and from anything else which reduces to talking about
individual dogs. I do think that it would be reasonable to use {nelci}
for this concept, but that it should be expressed by {nelci lo ka gerku}
rather than {nelci lo gerku}.
Martin
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