Re: [lojban] A Simpler Quantifier Logic (blog article)

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 9, 2016 at 12:49 PM, selpahi <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

On 08.10.2016 02:23, And Rosta wrote:

Each argument place is either
distributive or collective? Would you not also want an "unspecified as
regards distributivity"? And wouldn't this mean that where the xorxesian
underspecification of distributivity would have one predicate with, say,
three argument places, yours would have 2^3 or 3^3 predicates? This
looks so untenable that I conclude I must be misunderstanding you.

This would indeed be untenable, but I do not believe that you need every version of every predicate. For example, I believe that a distributive {citka} is enough. Very often, a non-distributive version is either not distinct from the distributive version, or includes some added meaning of "doing it together while possibly some of them only watch" (things like {kansi'u lo ka citka}). There is a lot more to be said here, but I'd rather first hear any additional points from you.

I don't believe a distributive "citka" is all that useful. I want to be able to say "the children ate the whole cake" without having to introduce any roundabouts.

It's also a simplification to say that there are only two kinds of distributivity (fully distributive and fully collective). Those are just the two extremes. In many cases we can have partial distributivity. For example, I can say "the children took the chairs to the garden", when one of the children took one chair, another one took two, and two other children took one chair together. If you make "take" distributive, you make it hard to say something simple like "the children took the chairs to the garden" when you don't know or don't care about how the action was distributed among children and chairs. If you say you can use the collective version for that, then you can use it for everything, since in that case "non-distributive" doesn't really mean "all together at once". 

 

Unspecified distributivity in an argument place is a form of ambiguity at the definitional level of a predicate.

No, it's just a form of vagueness, where you don't specify what you don't want or need to specify.

 

It makes it very difficult to ever answer "what does it mean to {broda}", because there are by definition multiple potentially non-overlapping answers.

That's true with or without distributivity. Very few predicates can be defined so precisely that they won't admit of multiple potentially non-overlapping definitions.

(I cannot possibly count the hours that went into discussing {bevri lo pipno} over the years without ever getting to a conclusion. This sort of stuff is hard to sort out!)

But don't we already know what it means? At least to the extent that we can use it without creating any kind of confusion? Why wouldn't a definition similar to "support and move (someone or something) from one place to another." work?

There are other ways (for example, in the realm of pragmatics) to deal with vague distributivity, outside of the definition of argument places, and I prefer those ways.

I'm not too sure how stringent you want to be with defining distributivity into all predicate places. For some places it's reasonable that it be part of the definition of the predicate ("pavmei" might be an example). For other predicates, I don't see how forcing a fixed distributivity helps, since there are things that can just as well be done separately or together.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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