Re: [lojban] No title, since the subject will have changed by the time it gets there

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

Sent from my iPad

On Nov 24, 2011, at 9:44 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

> * Wednesday, 2011-11-23 at 13:34 -0800 - John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> 
>> Summary
> 
> Good idea!
> 
>> 1. {zo'e}, as implicit in unfilled places, can't mean either "what I (would 
>> have) had in mind" or a particular quantifier, because there are too many cases 
>> where it has to mean the other.
> 
> Pardon?

What is obscure here?  
{zo'e} can't be either one of these because both of them occur as reasonable expansions into the blank space and being one would preclude being the other.  Unless you mean that a particular quantifier is one thing I might have had in mind.  But that creates the problem of mixing variables with names, which is not where we want to go, I think.

> 
>> It can't be {zi'o} either, since that really 
>> does both the sense and reference of the underlying predicate (think of all 
>> those places which can't be gone to from anywhere by any route on any means of 
>> transportation -- the center of the Earth, say, pace Edgar Rice Burroughs).
> 
>> Ideally (I think), unfilled places should be particular quantifiers,
> 
> Surely not just that. {ta melbi} is quite a different assertion from {ta
> melbi da}.

{ta melba} presumably means {ta melba mi}, so is a case where the fill should be made or 
{ zo'e} used.  (I don't expect this to happen except in really  formal writing -- and probably not even there -- but we're talking about feed into semantics her and how to fill in gaps.) 
> 
>> {zo'e} should be stated when a fixed, though perhaps unspecified,
>> referent is intended.
> 
> I think having a word which literally acts as if the place were unfilled
> is a useful enough feature that we shouldn't do away with it unless
> necessary.
> 
> Perhaps we can use {lo du} for the meaning you suggest?

I think I am missing your point here. {zi'o} says the place is unfilled.  {zo'e} says the place is filled but I'm but telling you by what.  And what does {lo du} do?  It is either the self-identical things, which provides no information, or it is the things identical with some unnamed thing, which is just the problem we are out to solve, so doesn't help.
> 
>> While I'm at it, we should change {ce'u} over to a variable-binding
>> operator so we can do abstractions right.
> 
> Pardon

Make it be lambda and put variables after it, so we can distinguish when two arguments are the same from when they are different.
> 
>> 2. {lo broda} refers to a bunch of brodas (either an L-set or a plural 
>> reference, as your ontological conscience guides you), fixed by context but 
>> possibly not terribly specific. The bunch may have a single member or encompass 
>> all brodas that have ever been and maybe more (all in this universe of 
>> discourse, of course, though maybe not in this world
> 
> But all satisfying broda(_) in this world, right, whether or not
> zasti(_)?
> 
Yes, I suppose so.

> (This relates to maikxlx's intensionality remarks)
> 
>> ). These latter, maximal, bunches  represent brodakind for all
>> practical purposes. Because of the transparency of bunches, such
>> a bunch of brodas is also a bunch of kinds of brodas, etc.  These
>> maximal bunches might usefully have a separate gadri.
>> 
>> Another bunch type which could use its own gadri is a mass, which can be viewed 
>> either as the kind parts of brodas which can still broda (atoms, molecules, 
>> cells, ....) or as constructed by going through all the parts of brodas, sorting 
>> out ones that are not broda and gathering the rest into the new bunch, to be 
>> further analyzed.
>> Some few problems remain: letters (though this can be made to fit in, if you 
>> don't mind considering all the even transient occurrences of a character in 
>> 4-space), geometric figures, things with the order type of the reals, and so on 
>> (mainly mekso, so we can forget about them for another twenty years).
>> 
>> 3. Bunches relate to predicates in a variety of ways, for none of which does 
>> Lojban have an explicit marker, though some can be inferred from other factors 
>> (quantifiers, modals -- though we are somewhat defective there as well, or maybe 
>> just more pragmatic or rhetorical devices -- I'm not sure what generalization or 
>> stereotype is).  I don't have a complete list and am unsure about the status of 
>> some I do have, so some discussion would be welcome.
> 
> Right, this is the part of your approach I'm unhappy with. I'm loath to
> give up the simple version of plural semantics, whereby a selbri is
> interpreted in a given world just as a relation on the set of bunches.
> 
But as far as I can see, you are the one who has given that up.  I certainly have not.  I have nothing but bunches of broda all the way up (or down, as the case may be).  I am deliberately avoiding the use of"set", since that raises other problem.  So far as I am concerned, the domain of the functions can be just bunches (of bunches, if you like).

> Complicating this with your "modes of predication" (conjunctive,
> disjunctive, collective, statistical...) seems to fit lojban ill,
> precisely because lojban has no way to mark them.

So far as I can tell, this jumble just comes with plural reference, together with an attempt to realistically with how various things we say are related to the things we talk about.  I don't suppose the list is complete yet, but that is only a practical problem.  As for not fitting Lojban, Lojban was designed without plural reference (or L-sets) and so makes no allowance for them.  What it does partly make allowance for is using (C-)sets to represent plurals.  But just what that involved was never spelled out too clearly (and much of what was originally spelled out was lost in xorlo), so we cannot merely take it over for L-sets.  Restoring some of that, or devising new conventions, can cover much of the difficulty and perhaps all, depending on how wide our convention net spreads.

> The alternative is to further complicate the domain - adding more
> derived entities beyond bunches. The marking can then be done with gadri
> and quantifiers.

I'm not sure what you mean here.  I don't see how adding new entities (what, I wonder) will help with the modes of predication issue.  A few nice adverbs seem to be the most natural way to proceed.  Gadri, we decided long ago, are not going to help with issue -- well, except that marking off those gigantic bunches does flag that some "statistical" predication is intended, or, perhaps, genetic.
> 
> I don't have a coherent scheme to propose for that, though... in
> particular, although the "bunches of slices" approach And & I were
> formulating the other week seems to deal with many problems, I don't see
> how it fits with generic predication.

I haven't looked back to see you earlier system nor what, if anything, I said about it, so i'm not sure what problems you think it solves (I'm not even sure what problems you think you have to solve).  Nor am I sure what you mean by generic predication, unless that is just another mode, involving those large bunches again.
> 
>> 4.  We need a way to sort out the official meaning (sense, a function on worlds) 
>> and the ordinary meaning, an area in in the web of  other meanings (probably not 
>> a spot in the Platonic tetrahedron anymore).  And then say which one we are 
>> talking about.
> 
> Pardon?

Well, it seems to me that people (myself included) flop back and forth among "lion" represents a function from(or relation between) things and truth values and "lion' represents a function from worlds to a set of objects in that world and "lion" represents the property of being a large cat (genus Panthera) ... .  Trying to satisfy the various conditions these impose is a problem, since they are very different .  I think part of our problem is that we often are at cross purposes here.
> 
>> 5.  I always told my students that, for me, memory is not a pramana, but tends 
>> to be spotty and self-aggrandizing, so I won't argue with Lojban about what I 
>> said twenty yeara ago; he has the records (but I bet he can't find 'em).  And, 
>> of course, I may well have changed my mind over the years.  But still I am 
>> shocked to think I ever was pleased with a modal "can and does".  The need for a 
>> logical necessity operator is less pressing that a variety of strong modals and 
>> their duals for the major kinds of compulsions (logic is rarely relevant except 
>> in the most hair-splitting arguments).  I am not sure about where they belong 
>> grammatically, but in Logic they function pretty much exactly like negation and 
>> tense.
> 
> I'm liking xorxes' suggestion that some "irrealis" UI act like modal
> operators - e.g. {ei} for deontic, {ia} for doxastic etc - using
> a correctly placed e.g. {ca'a ei} when we want non-default scope.

Probably right.  There are also some looser ornaments that might be useful in this general area.  But, in a logical language of the sort Lojban claims to be, they should all have grammar.

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