I thought I sort of understood what blobularism was, but now I am considerably
less sure -- and getting more so the more I read. A nice straightforward
account would be useful as Hell. What I understand seems to me to be totally
compatible with what I take to be the Readymadeist position (or at least the SAE
metaphysics) and with what I understand to be the process of language-learning
and the nature of linguistic constructs, So, I don't see the conflict, which,
apparently means I am missing something crucial. What?
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.