[lojban] Lions and levels and the like

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

If someone asks, out of the blue, how many lions there are and I say "About 12,000", my answer may be wrong but it is the right sort of answer.  If the gotcha questioner says "no, there are four" I can righteously respond "Hey, there are five just in our Zoo".  If he goes on to explain  "The European (now extinct), the African, the Indian, and the Asiatic", I might exclaim "Oh, you meant *kinds* of lions!".  Yet, had he begun the conversation with "There are four lions: the European, the Asiatic, the Indian, and the African", I would have understood him fine and had no complaints. I would equally have no problems with "That lion is the same as the one we saw yesterday" nor, probably, with "Lion (or lions) is (are) quite tasty, when marinated in monkey-brain sauce and roasted over an open fire", nor "Lions eat gazelles" nor "A/The lion is/Lions are the second largest cat".  And so on through countless other examples. 

The point is that the word "lion" (and "lions") can indicate a number of different ontological levels, from the narrowest to the broadest and most abstract.  There is is, though, a default level that turns up in the absence of contrary contextual clues, even though it may be easily overridden by those clues.  We have words for the various levels, which we can use to explicitly set the level or change in mid discussion ("kind", "segment", "meat", "typically" and "species" roughly for the examples above).  Shifting without making note of the shift or starting off at the non-default level without a flag, is a Gricean misdemeanor.

What the default level is for a given word varies from word to word: "lion" takes sort of midlevel gross physical objects, "letter" takes a highly abstracted level (there are twenty-six letters in the English alphabet).  Other words probably take lower levels, Buddhist technical terms for components of a person probably somewhere around the bottom.  And, as the last example indicates, each level can be expressed in a number of ways.

As far as I can figure out, the recent discussion on the {zo'e} thread (or at least one or two of those discussions) hinges on whether we have the same fluidity of levels in Lojban and whether certain moves constitute misdemeanor violation level shifting.  That is, what brodas?  Or, perhaps more precisely, what brodas in what way?   A single thing may broda individually; a bunch may do so collectively, or conjunctively, or disjunctively, or statistically, or in many more complex ways.  Also involved is the nature of some levels: are kinds just bunches of things or are the intensional objects of some sort? Are segments parts of objects or independent things to which objects may be related in a way analogous to the way kinds are related to objects?  In general, no side has been very clear (at least in a single continuous statement) on any of these issues, making the whole rather difficult to follow, let alone to critique.  Hopefully, this will change.
Sent from my iPad

-- 
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.