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

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
>
> Suppose we have a forall-exists statement. Any at all will do;
> let's consider
>    "every French person wears a beret"
> and render it in lojban as
>    (A) {ro faspre cu dasni su'o ransedyta'u}.
>
> Then with malkinds, if (A) is true it would also be true that
>    (B) {su'o ransedyta'u cu se dasni ro faspre},
> i.e. we can just swap the quantifiers over and get another true
> statement.

The only way (A) and (B) can be logically equivalent is if

(i) su'o faspre cu du ro faspre

or

(ii) su'o ransedyta'u cu du ro ransedyta'u

If neither (i) nor (ii) are true, then (A) and (B) cannot be equivalent.

> If xorxes says (B) - or {ro faspre cu dasni lo ransedyta'u}, which
> appears to be approximately equivalent

The whole point of xorlo was to get away from the idea that "lo
ransedyta'u" was equivalent to "su'o ransedyta'u".

> - I don't know how, beyond my
> prior knowledge of which was more likely, to tell whether he really means
> to make the surprising statement that all french people share a single
> beret, or just the (za'a also false!) statement that every french person
> wears a beret.

If I say "ro faspre cu dasni su'o ransedyta'u" you can in no way
conclude that that I mean to say that all french people share a single
beret. They are different statements. You could only infer the latter
if you knew or assumed that only one thing is ransedyta'u  (or that
only one thing is faspre, but your talk of sharing already eliminates
that possibility, since it requires at least two faspre).

If I say "ro faspre cu dasni lo ransedyta'u" the first thing you need
to do is identify the referent or referents of "lo ransedyta'u". In
this case, you could easily conclude that all French people wear the
same headgear (but "sharing" implies more than that, perhaps that they
take turns with it, or that it is big enough to cover all their heads
at once, none of which is suggested by the original).

> Generally, with malkinds, the order of quantifiers in a sentence gives
> *no* information, at least until you bring in informal things like
> emphasis and convention.

The order of quantifiers gives all the information that quantifiers
can provide. It is true that it doesn't give any information about
what the contents of the domain of discourse are, or what the
cardinality of the domain of quantification is, but that's not the job
of a quantifier.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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