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

Martin Bays, On 15/10/2011 21:04:

* 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").


I don't know if the Lojban or the English is ambiguous (-- the English certainly seems not to be, and I don't see why Lojban should be different); my only point was that lo + countable is not more ambiguous than lo + mass or le or la.

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.


Yes, that's right. That's my point. (Xorxes makes all the points I do, only better, which is partly why I keep out of the discussion. The other reason is that I can't keep up with the pace you two are managing -- I pop out today to Occupy London and contribute to the overthrow of capitalism, and return to find two dozen more messages in the thread, all of which require careful reading. My greater participation in the thread would risk abetting the maintenance of kleptocracy and the suppression of social justice!)


This seems to me a good reason not to have Obama-stages!


Natural language (or english, at least) does, but the key point is that it's a metaphysical choice. You can choose to reject Obama-stages but accept lion-subtypes, but that must be your choice, not Lojban's. Lojban should be metaphysically neutral. Well, maybe you don't think it should be neutral, but in that case if it had to commit to one metaphysics, I'd say it should commit to there being both Obama-stages and lion-subtypes.


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"?


A generalization formulated in terms of a single individual, but applying to multiple individuals that the single individual stands for. E.g. "The average man is six foot tall". I.e. what you mean by 'kind', I think.


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.


Are they really, in the final analysis, about mundanes? Is there anything in xorlo that forces the kind--mundane distinction to be recognized? As far as lo goes, there is no kind--mundane distinction. For every individual X and Y there is an individual Z thatX and Y are subtypes of; for every individual Z, there are individuals X and Y that are subtypes of Z. That's the world according to lo (as I see it); perhaps different gadri, such as lo'e/le'e and loi/lei, might be grounded in different principles.

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.


I haven't grasped the subtleties of your argument, but if it presupposes the kind--mundane distinction then it's not valid (in the context of lo as I understand it).

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 think it's not an actual ambiguity. It's a kind of potential ambiguity, in that if Z is referred to as an individual, in any further inferentially derived propositions in which X is instead conceived of as a generalization over subtypes there may be a scope ambiguity. This is not a linguistic problem.


I don't see that this problem comes up if we don't have kinds or stages.


Language must be tailored to accommodate metaphysicses. This discussion seems to be about preferred metaphysicses, but why does it require debate? lV gadri are based on one particular coherent metaphysics. If there is another different metaphysics that should also be accommodated, it could be associated with a different gadri series.




(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.


Do you have evidence and arguments to support these claims? They don't seem true to me.

"Not every mammal gives birth to live young" -- false for kinds, true for mundanes; but that doesn't mean "mammal" is ambiguous.


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.


Right. That's what I had in mind. This would give a way of unambiguously showing that something is a kind; but you'd still be wanting a way of unambiguously showing that something isn't a kind. There aren't any ready-made candidates for that, but afaik the lVi gadri are essentially undefined, little used, and little needed, so you might argue that use for them.


(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,


Is it, though? How?


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}.


But the same could be said for {nelci lo ka me la martin}, or {nelci lo ka martin} (with xorxes's cmevla-are-brivla rule).

--And.

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