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

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 5:15 PM, selpahi <seladwa@gmx.de> wrote:

On 10.10.2016 02:36, Jorge Llambías wrote:

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.

Of course. But I believe that a distributive {citka} does not prohibit this.

A place is distributive when "ko'a broda" necessarily entails "ro (pa) ko'a broda".

"lo verba pu citka pi ro lo titnanba" should not entail "ro (pa) lo verba pu citka pi ro lo titnanba", but if citka1 was distributive, it would.

Let us look at some of the many possible meanings of a simple quantified statement in English, say, "At least three people carried a chair":

1) At least three people are such that each of them carried a chair.
2) At least three people are such that each of them was involved in carrying a chair.
3) Some people that are at least three moved a piano together.

Would you say that all of these describe the same relationship or different relationships?

They are all different situations, all describable by the original sentence, which is not as specific as the more specific (1), (2) and (3).

Or your "eating cake" example, would you say that each different reading is a different meaning of "eat"?

No, that's my point, "eat" can describe many different situations, which you can distinguish by adding more words.

I mentioned above that there are other means by which intermediate distributivity can be achieved, and by which "the children ate the cake" is acceptable even with a distributive "eat".

One such approach is one that we use in other areas of Lojban (or any language) as well, and that is the idea of pragmatic slack. In certain contexts and situations, sentences that are false when taken literally can still be considered true at the level of detail that is currently relevant. We don't care if really every single one of the things ate cake, because it isn't relevant to our specific situation.

But that's not the issue here. Even if every single one of them ate cake, it is false that any one of them ate the whole cake, let alone each one of them. Distributivity would require that every one of them ate the *whole* cake.

Similarly, we don't mind if someone says "I woke up at nine" when really they woke up a few minutes after nine. Nevertheless, the meaning of "wake up at nine" is not changed, nor is the meaning of "ate cake" changed.
(Lasersohn (1999) discusses this in great detail)

I'm not talking about "eat cake", I'm talking about "eat the whole cake". I have no problem with saying that "eat cake" is distributive. But "eat the whole cake" is not even close to being distributive.

And additionally, when it is important, words like {kansi'u} exist (and I have proposed that a bunch of similar words could exist that express related forms of "doing something together", depending on the nature of the togetherness (e.g. just being in the same place as some of them eat, helping each other so that some of them eat, and so on). These are not necessarily roundabout, and you would only use them when you think it matters.

Definitely.

So all in all, you may say it doesn't matter which approach we use as long as you

> can say "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.

But it makes a difference to me, because in one case we throw our hands in the air about the meaning of a predicate, and in the other case we can decide what it means on a fundamental level.

I'm still not sure what you have in mind. If you tell me that citka1 is distributive, then "lo so'i verba pu citka pi ro lo titnanba" sounds like nonsense to me, because a distributive citka1 would entail "ro (pa) lo so'i verba pu citka pi ro lo titnanba".

For some places it's
reasonable that it be part of the definition of the predicate ("pavmei"
might be an example).

{pavmei} cannot be distributive. It is only true of things that are one in number. {[su'oi] re da pavmei} is false. If you meant its distributivity type must be non-distributive, then yes.

I assumed you were using "pavmei" to mean "x1 is/are individuals", as opposed to "pa mei", "x1 are one".

The first one would have to be distributive: "lo so'i prenu cu pavmei" would be true and it entails "ro pa lo so'i prenu cu pavmei": "the many people are individuals" entails "each one of the many people is an individual".

The second one is necessarily non-distributive (like all "PA mei" predicates). "lo so'i prenu cu pa mei" would mean that the many people are one, which would be false, since they are many. (We can leave for another day "the many people are one nation" and things like that.)

There are many predicates that only make sense non-distributively.

Yes. "simxu" to take a common example.

There are also many predicates that are fundamentally distributive, and where making them non-distributive only adds vagueness.

My understanding of "pavmei" (meaning "individual") would be one of them, but maybe you were using "pavmei" to mean something else. I don't believe "citka" is a good example of fundamentally distributive, since it's easy to come up with clearly non-distributive examples, such as "they ate the whole cake".

But it makes me wonder. Is it really such a crazy idea for Lojban to have different words for rather different kinds of carrying even though English only has one? Let's not forget that Lojban is also a way to experience new ways of thinking about situations. We split English words into multiple distinct brivla all the time, why shouldn't we here? It would be interesting.

I don't mind introducing overly specific predicates, as long as we don't lose the more general ones so that we can still say simple things in simple ways.

mu'o mi'e xorxes