Sent from my iPad
* Friday, 2011-11-25 at 12:38 -0600 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>: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>:
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?
It was just the English language being its usual annoyingly ambiguousself - I couldn't disambiguate the relative scopes of "can", "not" and"either". After your restatement, I'm interpreting it as"not ((possible:...) or (possible:...))". I hope that is what wasintended!
Well, literally, NMDpq, but that is equivalent.
{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.
OK. So we need a meaning for {zo'e} which has each of these two asspecial cases. This could be "particular quantifier over a domainI (could) have in mind" - a special case being that it's quantificationover a singleton domain, so equivalent to it just being a constantI (could) have in mind.
But making it a quantifier makes it subject to quantifier rules. To be sure, if it is restricted to some single object, the difference between some and all disappears. The problem is ensuring that the thing at the end of{poi} is in fact a predicate with a single (and the right)referent. Actually, the single requirement doesn't generally need to hold, since we have plural reference, presumably -- unless you want a single bunch, which you are pretty much sure to get. But, of course, the particular and universal quantifiers don't collapse under negation. In short, I don't think this works.
There's the related thorny issue of observer places - although {sance}is just "x1 is a sound emitted/produced by x2", so trees are no issue,{carmi} is "x1 is intense/bright/saturated/brilliant in property (ka) x2as received/measured by observer x3". Is a candle's light carmi (be fizo'e) when there's no-one around to see it? Or is it only carmi be fizi'o
This just shows how hopelessly bolloxed the treatment of blanks is. We have to have them to have a usable language, but, if we do, the clarity and perhaps the logic slips away. Of course, part of the problem is the number of places on many predicates, inviting most of them to be blank most of the time. If more things were add ons rather than left offs, there would be fewer problems of this sort, though probably more of some other kind.
{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,
Yes, that was the intention. So it would have the meaning you'resuggesting for {zo'e}, whether or not {zo'e} itself does.(Except that it only works if the unfilled second place of {du} isinterpreted correctly... it would be nice to have a clearer way ofgetting at the always-true unary predicate. Do we have one?)
I don't see the advantage of this. If we have to glork (where is this word from, by the way,? It seems to mean something like "grok", but I don't recognize the source.) the identity of the second member of the identity, we have to identify the first one as well and then we are back to just {zo'e} again. On the other hand, if this is just the self identity, then it refers to any bunch in the universe of discourse and again we have to glory the right one. So it keeps coming back to "what I have in mind", which doesn't deal with all the particular quantifier cases.
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.
We can already get that effect by using anaphora - {lo ka ce'u ri broda}is unary, while {lo ka ce'u ce'u broda} is binary.
I find using anaphoric pronouns to refer to variables to be very anti logical ;variables are their own anaphora.
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.
Ah, so it looks like I have been misunderstanding you. I understood youas having the truth value of a predication (in a world) depend on threethings - the predicate, the bunches which are its arguments, and themode(s) of predication. Now I'm understanding you as saying that itdepends only on the first two, with the mode(s) merely being a way ofdescribing how it is that the truth value is related to the truth valuesof the various predications where the bunches are replaced by theirsubbunches. Is that right?
I'm not sure what this means, but it should mean something like "the truth value of a predication depends, inter alia, on the way the subbunches of the bunch which is the argument relate to the predicate." Does the bunch have the property because all of it's subbunches do or because of them do or because none of them other than the whole do, or is predicate applied to the bunch in some "statistical" way, and so on. Clearly, the students wear green ties in a way quite different from the way they surround a building or come from several countries or live at home or have above average intelligence or are civil.
Assuming it is - what makes me uneasy is the shift from one mode to
another when our bunches get large enough.
But then I don't see what size has to do with it. I suppose you mean the practical problem of a number of children getting to know a great number of mothers, let alone loving them. Well, if it can't be done, then the connections are not both conjunctive, and maybe no form is true (which, of course, is always a possibility). But there is no shift from mode to another except as the facts require, that is, not at some theoretical point but just at the practical one.. In {ro lo verba cu prami lo mamta}, if {lo mamta} is interpreted as
a few specific mothers, presumably prami acts distributively in x2
giving the meaning that each of the children love each of those mothers.
But if we enlarge the bunch to the maximal bunch of mothers, it switches
to be (something like) disjunctive - now we're just saying that each
child loves some mother (or maybe just Mother, if that's somehow
different?), perhaps their own, and not that each loves every mother.
Well, I didn't think that was what the original said in the first place, nor would I (without a lot of contextual build up) have taken {lo manta} to refer too some maximal set of mothers. I might have if the beginning were {ro verba}, but even then, my first response would be to read in an implicit "his own". I would never read it to be about Mother in xorxes' sense, since I don't believe in what little I can make of that notion. So where did this switch occur on the way from our little bunch to themaximal bunch, and why? Does it have something to do with adding motherswhich don't exist? Does adding just one non-existent mother cause theswitch?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
Things like the kind Mother.) will help with the modes of predication issue. A few
nice adverbs seem to be the most natural way to proceed.
So this would be explicitly marking which mode of predication is meantto be in use, hence giving joint information about the precise predicateintended (when there's vagueness in that) and the bunches intended.
So far as I can see, the predicates nor the bunches change, just the mode. 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.
I see the first as being what you get from the second after specifyinga world, and the third as being another way of looking at the second.
Specifying a world gives a set, from which a function can be derived, but the usual approach is to take the function as given and the set derived. As to whether a genus-and-species can be used to generate any of the function or sets or conversely, the jury is either still out or hung.
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "lojban" group.
To post to this group, send email to lojban@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to lojban+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/lojban?hl=en.
|