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Re: [lojban] Balningau: The Great Update


On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 1:13 PM, 'John E Clifford' via lojban <lojban@googlegroups.com> wrote:
I haven't slogged through the latest published take on xorlo yet, but have several questions/objections to what I currently take to the official line. I do think that, at heart, it is the right way to go, but it has inherited or accreted a number of doctrines that render it less useful (an absolute notion of individuals for one). 

I don't think xorlo espouses any notion of individuals. xorlo is basically just this:

                lo broda = zo'e noi ke'a broda

There's nothing about individuals there. It just says that "lo" converts a selbri into a constant, which is then used as an argument of the selbri in the bridi in which it appears, as opposed to turning it into a quantifier that quantifies the bridi in which it appears, which was CLL's take (i.e. the old lo broda = su'o da poi broda zo'u .... da ....). It also says that the referent(s) of that constant satisfy "ke'a broda".

Individuals turned up in guskant's recent discussion of inner quantifiers. The question was, what exactly does the inner quantifier count? One answer is that it counts the individual referents of the sumti, but then what is an individual? One circular answer is to say that an individual is whatever the inner quantifier counts. A possible definition for "individual" is to say that ko'a is an individual iff ro da poi da me ko'a zo'u ko'a me da. 

guskant is not too happy with that answer, because he wants to use inner quantifiers to count things that may contain other things (in the "me" sense of contain) which themselves don't count. To me that just amounts to excluding those other things from the universe of discourse, guskant prefers to just flag some things in the universe of discourse as countable and the rest as not. I don't think there's any difference of substance here, just of presentation. I can't think of a sentence that would change meaning depending on which metalinguistic explanation one prefers, except perhaps cryptic stuff like "su'oi da no mei" which for me is necessarily false and guskant may accept as true.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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