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Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like
John E. Clifford wrote:
Hmmm! Nice case! Of course, some first transistor must have been
invented that all the others copied and improved upon, but that doesn't
really dodge your point. At the moment, I don't know what to suggest,
except to hope that Lojban still has a word for kinds. Bunches are,
inter alia, Lesniewski's wholes (but xorxes doesn't like this kind of
objectifying, preferring plural reference, which works the same way
formally). I don't take 1a to be about kinds, but just about some
unspecified bunch of lions (at least in Lojban, lo cinfo). Kinds don't
seem to be the sort of things that ruin gardens, though their exemplars
may. The factual situation, as far as transistors, etc. are concerned,
is about genealogy, all transistors descend from something invented by
Shockley. But that is at least as hard to express as types, so I wait a
while on it.
Actually, I just read something on this a couple days ago.
There was a patent issued in Canada for a field-effect transistor in
1925, but it isn't clear if any were built. A similar patent was issued
in Germany in 1934. Neither has much to do with the Shockley transistor
other than name and general semiconductor nature. Bardeen and Brattain
then invented the germanium transistor in 1947, but Shockley ended up
getting a share of the credit. There was an independent invention in
France in 1948. Texas Instruments produced the first silicon transistor
in 1954, and MOS-FETs came even later, and I think they are more like
the 1925 idea than like the 1947 one. It would be difficult to call any
of the reinventions prior to 1948 as being "family tree descendants".
Those afterwards would probably give some ancestral credit to Shockley's
group, but that might be a legal fiction due to patent law rather than
truly being genealogical.
The same probably goes for the brothers' Wright and the airplane. Many
others were independently inventing them when the Wrights first flew,
and it is hard to argue that airplanes are necessarily more descended
from Wright's plane than any of those others.
How to express these distinctions in Lojban is beyond anything I would
attempt to argue, especially post xorlo.
lojbab
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