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

Martin Bays, On 18/10/2011 04:26:

Ah! Have {lo} *only* able to get kinds, you mean?


Yes. With anything that looks like a 'mundane' reconceived as a kind.


That would indeed deal
with my main issue with kinds+xorlo. But presumably xorxes wouldn't like it.


Really? That's not my impression.


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".


Right... and "Elvis is not in my garden" could mean either "no Elvis is
in my garden" or "the Elvis is not in my garden". Yes, 'Elvis' in the
first sentence does seem to refer to a kind. But it isn't referring to
anyone called Elvis, so I don't see that this shows that Elvis has
stages.

The "temporal stages of Obama" example could be dealt with by
intepreting Obama as the kind 'Obama-stages', I agree, but it could also
be dealt with just by using tenses. I'm not sure how to deal with "an
unusually exuberant Obama"... but since it's a rare construction, a hack
like transforming it to "Obama, who was unusually exuberant" would seem
reasonable.


The point is that English  does allow restrictive modification of _Obama_, so does recognize subtypes of Obama.

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.


But it requires a metaphysics which has kinds. That seems pretty
restrictive to me.


The metaphysics has nothing but kinds, but has an infinitude of kinds; the lack of restrictiveness is in the infinitude. But I don't think this point about permissiveness is worth pressing.


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.


But they're not isolated. If lV forces you to put kinds in your
universe, then (at least unless we introduce rules to prevent it)
quantifiers like {da poi broda} and {ro broda} will pick them up.

So if I choose to omit kinds from my universe but otherwise use the same
rules, I am likely to be misunderstood by a kind-using lojbanist, even
if I avoid using lV. Xorxes just gave a nice example, the other way
round: {mi zukte da poi do zukte} makes a sense with kinds that it
doesn't without them.


You may be likely to be misunderstood, but that's because of philosophical differences between you, not linguistic differences.  You don't have to agree on whether{mi zukte da poi do zukte} couod be true.


The metaphysics affects everything. I don't see that the language could
be considered well-specified if it didn't specify the metaphysics (on
the broad level we're talking about). Lojban with plural semantics is
very different from that without it; the same goes for kinds.


The language specifies the metaphysics that the language encodes, but that doesn't tell you how the universe actually is.

My question is whether you perceive a "jump" between individual lions
and the kind 'lions' of a different kind from that between the kinds
'fierce lions' and 'lions'. I don't think it's actually a precise
question about the structure of the partial order... it's rather that
I'd split "subtype" into two relations - "instance of" and "subclass
of".


I understand your questions. The answer is a very definite No. There are only types, related by the Subtype relation; and there are no instances.

I think it would be good to have other gadri based on a model in which there are no types, only instances.


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.


If the permissive one could be handled without introducing the
(effective) ambiguities we've been talking about, I'd be happy.


It may be, though, that the effective ambiguities inhere in any translation from type-only to instance-only models, so is inescapable.

The objections to that are that it is metaphysically biased,


Why is that a problem?
Avoidance of metaphysical bias was one of Lojban's aims. A fairly obvious and sensible one, since the language should not tell the speaker how the universe is, but rather should allow the speaker to describe how the speaker thinks the universe is. 
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.


Does every mammal give birth to live young?


At the species level yes (afaik), at the organism level no.

---and.

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