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Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable
Martin Bays, On 16/10/2011 06:05:
* Sunday, 2011-10-16 at 02:56 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>:
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:
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
So you're really not willing to consider the effective ambiguity when we
flatten everything to the level of actual lions, as derived above, to
count as an ambiguity? Or even as a problem? I really do find this very
strange.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that English seems to allow only reading (2), and that the same might go for Lojban.
); my only point was that lo + countable is not more ambiguous than lo + mass or le or la.
(what does countability have to do with anything? Would anything change
if we were dealing with an uncountable set, say with {lo namcu}?)
Countables have intrinsic boundaries, and that makes it relatively easy and natural to distinguish one mundane countable from another (of the same type). With uncountables, such as chlorine, it's relatively easy and natural to not distinguish one mundane from another, and hence the kind--mundane distinction too seems absent too.
This seems to me a good reason not to have Obama-stages!
Natural language (or english, at least) does
Does it really? My impression from xorxes' explanation of them (and I've
never come across the concept outside of this mailing list) is that
they're an alternative way of handling tenses, eventually mostly
equivalent to the straightforward "possible worlds" approach (where
there's one obama, but many of his properties (including his existence)
vary from world to world). I don't see how english could force you to
use stages.
I meant 'stages' not in the strict semantic sense but rather the looser sense that I'd understood it to have in this discussion, namely "subtype of a type that has intrinsic boundaries". "Obama" is a type that has intrinsic boundaries, but English allows us to speak of subtypes of Obama too, as in "the young Obama" or "(the) two Obamas" or "an unusually exuberant Obama".
The main difference between 'Obama' and 'lion' -- as far as accounting for their differing grammatical behaviour goes -- is that Obama is naturally seen as being a singleton at any one point in time. But where that difference diminishes, as with 'Father Christmas' or 'Elvis' or 'Mickey Mouse', so too does the difference in grammatical behaviour, so that it is quite usual to speak of "two Father christmases, two Elvises, two Mickey Mouses, a Father Christmas, a Mickey Mouse".
, 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,
Probably not. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by metaphysics here,
but I'm taking it to refer to the question of what we put in the domain
of our universe when doing model-theoretic formal semantics.
That's right.
I think
that the nature of lojban does impose some restrictions there - for
example, (roughly) there should be for each expressible unary predicate
precisely one object satisfying the corresponding ka. Lojban requires
this.
Ignoring domain-switching technicalities, xorxes would want it to also
contain, for each (appropriate?) unary predicate, another entity,
a kind, which satisfies the predicate itself.
In both cases, it's the language which is imposing this "metaphysical"
requirement. You can try to interpret expressions in the language
without following the requirement, but you're going to get bizarre
results which weren't those intended by the designers.
I was intending to make two points, but not distinguishing them clearly. The first is that the metaphysics entailed by the semantics of lV is an especially permissive one, making the fewest possible distinctions and prejudgements. If a language aspired to metaphysical neutrality and had to pick one metaphysics, it should pick that one. The other point is that this is just the metaphysics of lV; somebody wanting a different metaphysics could use different gadri. So Lojban could achieve metaphysical neutrality by offering a menu of different gadri.
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.
Where an Obama-stage is a proper subtype of Obama? What's a proper
subtype of an Obama-stage?
Does 'proper subtype' mean "X is a proper subtype of Y iff X is a subtype of Y and X is not a subtype of a subtype of Y"? If so, then I think the notion is not applicable; any putatively proper subtype can be reconstrued as an improper one.
Or do you not have discrete levels at all? Just the whole sort of
general mish-mash?
If you do have discrete levels, replace "final analysis" with "analysis
at a particular level".
If you don't... then I'm amazed that we can have a conversation in any
language!
I probably don't understand your question. Imagine a biological taxonomy, of genera, phyla, and so forth. If you can't see the root or the leaves of the taxonomic tree, you can't really identify levels.
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.
Yes, something like that. An ambiguity which it takes a few steps to get
to.
This is not a linguistic problem.
It's a problem which could be fixed by changing the language. In that
sense at least, it is a linguistic problem.
Translating one metaphysics into another will generally yield problems. That cannot be fixed by changing the language. I surmise that you would like just one metaphysics for the language, and you would like it to be much more restricted than the most permissive sort. The objections to that are that it is metaphysically biased, that the metaphysics conflicts with the one that others might want, and that it is hard to implement as the basis of the semantics of default gadri.
"Not every mammal gives birth to live young" -- false for kinds, true
for mundanes; but that doesn't mean "mammal" is ambiguous.
So you'd say the statement is simply false, with the kind 'porcupines'
as a witness?
I don't understand the question.
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.
That's actually not a bad idea. So {loi cinfo} would be some plurality
of actual lions, working like xor{lo} but not allowed to get a kind.
Given the plural reference, this isn't even all that far from the
historical meaning of lVi.
So then I'd understand {lo} as being simply ambiguous between {loi},
{lo'e} and {loi ka}; xorxes would complain that that's almost but not
quite accurate, because sometimes the {loi ka} version blocks the
others; meanwhile, I would be amazed by his ability to dynamically
switch kinds in and out of his domains to make quantified statements
make sense - but from a distance, happy in my constantish kindless
universe.
Sounds good.
Have you thought about rules for default outer quantifiers and scope interactions with negation, and so forth?
--And.
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