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

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

I'm still not sure I follow this problem.  In general the inference does not 
hold, of course, and the process by which it is made to appear to hold seems to 
involve changing the meaning of terms in mid stream, so that quantifiers that 
made sense in one case make no (or certainly not the same) sense in the other.  
They seem (stressed) to be consistent about the level on the same word in the 
same context, though the level may be one where the official definition seems to 
have little relevance.



----- Original Message ----
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Mon, November 7, 2011 11:19:40 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural 
variable

* Monday, 2011-11-07 at 07:42 -0800 - John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:

> Why is there only one level in Ready-Made?  I suspect that this is a straw man 

> you have set up, but the characterization of it -- and of blobular -- are so 
> vague as to make a clear judgement difficult.  I suspect that the only problem 

> with levels is just that {lo broda cu klesi lo broda} shouldn't hold.  Or that, 
>
> in the same context, {broda} is used sometimes for avatars (exemplars, slices, 

> ordinary things) and sometimes for kinds/masses/properties.  MB seems to be 
> saying that you do do this, but his evidence is somewhat confusing itself 
>(using 
>
> quantifiers inappropriately, for example), so I am not sure you do (or don't, 
> for that matter).  I do think, however, that there are limits as to how far up 

> or don you can shove a predicate without some indication of the shove, but I am 
>
> less sure what those limits are (using {cinfo} for what would normally be {ka 
> cinfo}, something about functions from worlds to sets, for example, seems to 
>far 
>
> up, using it for muscle fiber from a lion's leg muscle seems too far down -- 
>but 
>
> I am open to arguments either way).

I proposing a simple test/definition of when level-mixing has gone too
far:

A unary broda is Sloppy if, in any domain containing everything which
can broda, for any brode and brodi,
    {brode ro brodi su'o broda}
implies
    {se brode su'o broda ro brodi} 

(Technical restriction: brode can not be taken to be {du}, because that
has to be considered to be magic for the domain not to collapse.
{mintu} and {dunli} are fine, though).

If I understand xorxes and and correctly, they have every predicate
being Sloppy - the witness for the existential in the second sentence
can be taken to be the kind of broda which is broded by some brodi.

They try to dodge this problem by introducing informal rules to avoid
level-mixing within a single domain - in particular, they would never
consider a domain like those in the definition of Sloppy.

Martin

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