Re: [lojban] lions and levels and the like (was: {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable

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

I'm trying to get this on it's own thread and leave {zo'e} to itself for a while.
So, Ready-Madeists take the default case to be absolute and any deviation from it to require a note; Blobularists think that context determines the appropriate level and maybe even think that shifts in levels can often go unmarked.  So far, no problem, especially since I assume the language involved has fairly clear devices for marking levels and shifts, as English and, to a lesser extent, Lojban do.
I am less comfortable with calling Obama (a continuously existing physical entity) a type or a   haeceity or quiddity, all of which I think likely to be intensional or, at least, spiritual (Indian possibly excepted).  I tend to think of the levels below my Obama as being either temporal segments or physical chunks, and levels above as being bunches, which can, of course, each be subdivided into a number of other bunches or segments or chunks.
I suppose that you would (still?) insist that all of these have an intensional component which is the essential part.  For me, the only intensional aspect of it all is the identity issue going downward and the "are you sure everything in the bunch is a lion" part going up.  Typically, at least upward (for men and lions, though not so much for letters), some of the various bunches correspond to various properties as their extensions (referents).  And these properties do more neatly into matrices of the sort that seems to lie behind some of your remarks about types ( though, admittedly, these remarks could also apply to the jest relation in bunches).
I suppose that I do believe in absolute central types, in terms of which others are defines (notice the different characterizations of steps  and down from the intact, continuous Obama).  But that level indifferent for different cases.
And I do have to admit that there are concepts without a default level, mass nouns, for example.  These seem to initially assume container (as Lojban has it) or quantity, but that quantity can be an ocean or an eyedropper without much else said.  There are probablyother types as well.

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 11, 2011, at 2:11 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:

> John E Clifford, On 07/11/2011 15:29:
>> 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?
> 
> Ready-Madeism says that there is just one, determinate set of all individuals, where individuals are the things that predicates are predicated of. Blobularism says there are infinitely many different sets of all individuals, each set differentiated by varying criteria for differentiating individuals.
> 
> I (but not necessarily xorxes or other potential Blobularists) see Blobularism as consisting of taxonomical hierarchy of types, related to one another by the Subtype relation. Ready-Made individuals, such as Obama or a particular lion, correspond to types -- the types that consists of the haecceity (which is here equivalent to quiddity, I think) of Obama and the particular lion.So "Obama is American" involves not predicating Americanness of the individual Obama, but rather a claim that everything (or at least, something) that is Obama is American. Most types can have subtypes, so the taxonomy mostly lacks terminal leaf nodes and extends infinitely away from the root. Within the taxonomy of types there are no distinct levels.
> 
> John E. Clifford, On 09/11/2011 16:22:
>> 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.
> 
> I think I basically agree with this summary, with the proviso that Gricean misdemeanours are highly sensitive to the particular utterance context. I also think that levels are defined only relative to one another (by Subtype) rather than intrinsically. I suppose I might also question whether it is true for all words that it has a specified default level.
> 
> --And.
> 
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