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

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

Lord, I hope they are not the same as you and xorxes are talking about, 
explanation of which has escaped this discussion for a couple of decades it 
seems.
I am not sure about the details of how to do "I like lions" in detail, but I 
suppose it is rather like "Lions eat gazelles".  In any case, it doesn't need 
anything but  lions, modals and ivity (I think, until someone demonstrates 
otherwise, which none of this discussion has done). The simplest Lojban would be 
{mi nelci lo cinfa} and that would usually get by, but the final 
semantic/pragmatic spelling it out would take a bit.  As for the ambiguity of 
conjunctive, disjunctiive and collective. we live with it all the time, even in 
Lojban.  I don't think we should but I can't convince anyone to require the 
distinction -- and xorxes. at least  seems to insist on leaving it out whenever 
possible.  The issue in this case is just the problem in beginning logic of 
formalizing sentences and that is usually resolved by adjudicating scope 
disputes.  Since we don't have quantifiers here, we have to work by other means.

----- Original Message ----
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, October 15, 2011 6:45:01 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

* Friday, 2011-10-14 at 21:04 -0400 - 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

How does that deal with "I like lions"? If it doesn't, as I think it
doesn't, then these are not the same kinds of kinds which xorxes and and
are talking about.

> 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".

And does your approach (which I still don't really understand, I'm
afraid, and which I would anyway find very hard to consider acceptable
if it really involves ambiguity between disjunctive and conjunctive
predication) allow you to disambiguate to the first of these two? (not
just with {su'o cinfo na ku zvati lo mi purdi}, which omits the useful
contextual specificity of "some of the lions")

Martin

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