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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 16, 2011 at 10:11 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
> Jorge Llambías, On 17/10/2011 01:31:
>>
>> On Sat, Oct 15, 2011 at 11:19 PM, And Rosta<and.rosta@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> The commonest case where covert donkey sentences occur is with
>>> conditionals:
>>> "If you give me money, I'll spend it on drugs" = "Every possible
>>> circumstance in which there is money that you give me is a circumstance
>>> in
>>> which there is money that you give me and I spend on drugs". I don't
>>> think
>>> your solution works for that. Applying your solution gives (I think)
>>> "Every
>>> circumstance is such that in it I spend all money that you give me",
>>> which
>>> has the wrong meaning. Crucially, the conditionals rely on restricted
>>> quantification (over circumstances in which such and such is the case).
>>
>> Why does it have the wrong meaning? Is it still wrong if you use "any"
>> instead of "all"?
>
> In apprehending underlying forms, we need to get rid of "any", since it is
> an English reflection of a quantifier interacting with a conditional.

I take "any" here to be the same as "all", except it is plain that it
has no existential import. I still don't see what problem you see in
"Every circumstance is such that in it, for all money, if you give it
to me I spend it on drugs" or any of its variants.

> But let's change "money" to "five quid": "Every circumstance is such that in
> it I spend five quid that you give me". Wrong, obviously.

"Every circumstance is such that in it I spend *every* five quid that
you give me".

> Or try "If you
> tell me your name, I'll murmur it".

I don't see that as a donkey sentence, since it doesn't even have quantifiers.

>> I think my solution would give: "For any money, if
>> you give it to me, I'll spend it on drugs" or "I'll spend on drugs any
>> money you give me".
>
> Underlying "if" and conditionals is a logical form that is either
> repretitious, "Every possible circumstance in which there is money that you
> give me is a circumstance in which there is money that you give me and I
> spend on drugs", or else a donkey sentence, "Every possible circumstance in
> which there is money that you give me is a circumstance in which I spend it
> on drugs". So your challenge is to reformulate that, without using "if" or
> "any", but without the repetition (of "there is money that you give me").

I don't get why that is the challenge. In the original donkey
sentence, I did use "any" in replacement of the problematic "some":
You accepted "all farmers beat any donkey they own".


>> I think the issue with donkey sentences is not so much reformulating
>> them in terms of ordinary first order logic, which can be done by
>> replacing the short scope existential by a wide scope universal. The
>> problematic issue is explaining what's going on, since this conversion
>> is not licensed by any rules of logic.
>
> I see what you're saying, but I think we have different understandings of
> the quintessence of donkey-sentencehood.

For me it's that they have a pronoun whose antecedent is a bound
variable, but the pronoun is outside the scope of the quantifier
binding the variable... and yet they make sense.

> I take it to be when you have
> quantification within a restriction on a variable, in "for every X such that
> there is a Y such that F(X,Y), there is a Y such that F(X,Y) and G(X,Y)",

That's in non-donkey form.

> which might be Englished as the less repetitious donkey-sentence "for every
> X such that there is a Y such that F(X,Y), G(X,Y)".

Which is a donkey sentence, because the Y in G(X,Y) is outside the
scope of "there is a Y such that", so it should not be interpretable
in standard first order logic.

> I see that as the quintessence of donkey-sentencehood not because that is
> how it is standardly seen in linguistics, but rather because that is the
> main problem they present for a logical language.

The non-repetitious form of your sentence is:

"for every Y and for every X such that F(X,Y), G(X,Y)".

But the challenge is to explain why the apparently nonsensical form
has this sensical sense.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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