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

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

I don't think I ever held that all flying albatrosses had to exist at a single time ( and I can't figure out what I said that would sound like that).  What I probably did say was that all flying albatrosses are in the domain of discourse when I say "Flying albatrosses look funny" as a full generalization.  Otherwise it wouldn't be a full generalization.  But that has nothing to do with either existence or time.
I've forgotten what (i) is, so I am not sure (but then I have forgotten what Richard's semantics looks like in crucial details). Especially the generalized arbitrary partition bit.  On kinds, my position is just that kinds (if you want to use that word) are just biggest bunches viewed in certain ways and so call for nothing other than things of the ordinary sort.  To be sure, the recent talk about mass nouns has made me start to think again about details, but even they don't lead me toward mass-like kinds from which individuals are temporarily carved out.  Not for Lojban anyhow.

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 23, 2011, at 17:33, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * Sunday, 2011-10-23 at 14:15 -0700 - John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> 
>> Maybe I shouldn't have made the Buddhist crack, it does complicate matters.  If 
>> you take different times as separate worlds, then the ever-new view of domains 
>> does turn out to be like xorxes stages.  That is certainly not my intention, on 
>> either view (though the problem doesn't arise on the always-same view) [I 
>> actually tend to be a nominalist in a rather strict sense and so closer to Hans' 
>> discourse representation, which never officially gets behind the words. But that 
>> is not relevant here.]  But given that alway-new sense and taking times as 
>> worlds, your description of the situation is essentially correct (and its vague 
>> feeling of absurdity is one of the problems with that interpretation).  The 
>> connection between the two sets of albatrosses is not merely anaphora, but 
>> something involving vectors in time or some such analogy - "world lines" is a 
>> nice cover term (which, alas, also seem to reify the connections -- an old 
>> problem for Buddhists, too).  Of course, "here now" does cut things down to 
>> existents, pretty sharply (I suppose someone could argue, .... .  But why 
>> bother?). The point is that Lojban quantifiers do not add "and exists", ever.  
>> That comes out of the predicates, if at all.  As to whether the former flying 
>> albatrosses are flying now, that is hard to say (partly because it is unclear 
>> just what is being asked); in some cases they are in the current domain of 
>> discourse and in the extensions of both "albatross" and "flying", but it is not 
>> clear whether the current domain of discourse is tightly correlated with "now".  
>> And, of course, there is no rule that requires either the always-new 
>> interpretation of things nor the worlds view of time.  There are advantages and 
>> disadvantages to all of these choices.
>> 
>> A reasonable view (except for the 
>> complexities that spelling it out exactly involves) is that each world extends 
>> through time, with things coming into existence and falling out as time goes 
>> along, i.e., that our world is a typical world.  The formal gains of deviating 
>> from this view have to be pretty impressive to justify shifting from it.  On 
>> that view, the ten minutes ago's flying albatrosses still exist (most of them 
>> anyhow usually) but are no longer flying (the ones we can see, anyhow) and they 
>> did look funny and so contribute to the general claim that flying albatrosses 
>> look funny, even though they now look quite sedate -- largely because they are 
>> not flying.
> 
> But the point was that we needed all flying albatrosses to satisfy "is
> flying" at a single time for the (ii) interpretation of {lo} to work.
> I thought you were claiming this.
> 
> If you're not... I'm relieved!
> 
> What you wrote from "A reasonable view" on seems to agree with the
> kind of universe I'd been assuming (i.e. that of Montague's PTQ).
> 
> So do we agree that (i), or your generalised arbitrary-partition version
> (is), is needed to do kinds-like things with {lo} (assuming we want to
> avoid introducing xorxes-kinds)?
> 
> Martin

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