* Sunday, 2011-11-06 at 18:22 +0000 - tijlan <jbotijlan@gmail.com>:
> On 6 November 2011 15:10, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> > e.g. {su'o ctuca cu tavla ro le tadni}, uttered in a context in which we
> > might utter "A professor talked to all the students", can be taken two
> > ways. It could be the EA statement that there was a single (mundane)
> > professor who talked to all the students. But it could be the EA
> > statement that there was a single *kind* of professor who talked to all
> > the students. The latter would hold under e.g. the AE assumption that
> > each student was talked to by some logic professor.
>
> Are you saying that "a single professor" and "a professor of a single
> kind" are mutually exclusive?
In english, they're both horribly vague/ambiguous, which is what makes
english an awful metalanguage for this discussion. Sadly we have no
better common language.
By "a single (mundane) professor", I meant an actual professor who
occupies at any given time a human-shaped portion of space.
By "a single *kind* of professor", I meant something more abstract -
like logic professors, considered as a single thingy.
If every student talked to a logic professor, then there was a kind of
professor which talked to every student, so a professor talked to every
student.
The question is whether that argument goes through in lojban.
What do you think?
Martin
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