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Re: [lojban] Lions and levels and the like





On Wed, Nov 16, 2011 at 8:30 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
As I noted, in L-sets, membership and subsets are not distinct, i.e. every member is a subset and under certain interpretations, ever subset is a member, though some members are more basic, having no members but themselves.  So, a bunch of things also contains all the combinations of them.  From this point of view, then, a mass is just the bunch of its lowest level (what it is a bunch of, say): gold is the maximal bunch of gold atoms, lion is the maximal bunch of lion cells and so on.  More familiar object arise in the intersection of bunches: lions are in the intersection of lion and living organisms and so.  And every gold thing is in the intersection of gold and its particular form.  The only Lojbanic thing I see in all of this at the moment is that that maximal bunch ought to be given a separate gadri.


Well, subsetship (more generally, partship) and membership seem to work a little differently in Bunt's system.  As I learned from reading here (unfortunately several preview pages missing) it turns out that ensembles are essentially C-sets and L-sets generalized under one theory and reducible to either by excluding the other; you get set theory from ensemble theory by excluding L-sets, and mereology by excluding C-sets.  (IMHO this seems ideal.)  As far as intersections as in "golden ring", I believe that the "overlapped" ensemble of "continuous" masses like gold and "discrete" collections like rings would necessarily be empty, but I am not 100% sure on this point.  I need better documentation.  At worst, I am sure you could construct a mixed ensemble that would merge all continuous masses of gold and all discrete things made of gold to get the needed result for your intersection.  So maybe, just maybe, Lojban is doing the Right Thing by having predicates generally ignore the count/mass distinction.


 
There do remain a number of cases to which this general notion does not seem to apply.  Your case of the real line is one, letters seem to be another.  Here the approach seems to be to start at the top, work down and then back up, I think, but I don't know just how that goes.  Even with cases that fit this pattern pretty well, water, for excample, there are some problems, as you note.  Water molecules don't display the characteristic behavior of water (as do not also ice and steam), since they don't flow, etc.  But then, gold atoms don't shine and are not malleable, so this seems a minor problem.  And for generic cases, they probably are not significant, since the far more numerous and visible sub bunches will take over the "statistics". 

I find you idea of an aspect difference among the various uses of kinds (max. bunches) interesting, though I still tend to think of them in terms of different connections to predicates, a relic of the early days of plural reference.  And, indeed, even with aspects, some of this will still come into play with regular bunches, that is to say, bunches which do not claim to take in all the possible "atoms" (I am used to your usage here).

I kinda like this result, since it leaves basic things basic but covers kinds and masses economically from them.  Until some real snag comes along.

Is there a problem with modeling the extensions of predicates like "water"?  What is clear to me is that no purely discrete system like set theory is up to the job of modeling water (though some have tried to work within sets by treating "quantities of water" as atoms), but that's where Lesniewski and Bunt step in.  I am also not too worried about generics;  as I indicated I think that they are mere appearances calculated from the extension under predication involving some sort of gnomic verb aspect.  They give you all sorts of perplexing results for sure, ranging from "lo gerku cu mabru" to "lo remna cu cadzu le lunra", but the basic idea seems to be combing over extension-intrinsic properties, either ignoring time and space or collapsing them.  Then there are kinds, which generally seem to invoke intension-intrinsic properties (as in searching for a unicorn) or episodic events paradoxically affecting the extension (as in dodos going extinct) without invoking it -- either way, pure kind-predication does not seem to involve directly any atom or part of the extension.

I am sure there will be controversy in some of these areas at least until Lojban's semantics are much more rigorously formalized.

-Mike


 

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