Subject: Re: [lojban] a construal of lo'e & le'e

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 30 Oct 2001 16:56:18 EST

In a message dated 10/30/2001 9:24:42 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> The referent of {lo'e tanxe} is something
> you can see and touch, so is not abstract, unlike anything
> that is {du'u ce'u tanxe}, but one way of arriving at a conceptual
> representation of {lo'e tanxe} is through a process of *abstracting*
> away from the differences between individual boxes.
> 

OK, so lo'e broda is not abstract but something I can see or touch (if any 
broda is, I suppose). Dare I go on to say it is concrete then? In any case, 
it must be a broda, since it would be odd to say the typical (etc. etc.) 
broda is not a broda at all (the typical Englishman is a Poland China sow in 
Silesia?). So it is a member of lo'i broda and some particular member. But 
then it has some properties that NO other member has and lacks some 
properties that EVERY OTHER member has. Needlwss to say, this raises the 
question of the relation between the properties of the typical broda and 
typical properties of brodas. If the properties typical of brodas are 
defined as those of the typical broda, then some properties which almost all 
brodas have are not typical and some which almost none have are typical. And 
this seems wrong. OTOH if the typical broda is defined as the one that has 
the typical properties, then the one we have singled out is not -- as we said 
-- the typical one (and no ohter one will do significantly better). Further, 
picking a candidate (doomed to fail) is an entirely useless job, since we 
already have to know what we want to know in order to pick the candidate -- 
namely the properties typical of brodas.
In short, there is no typical broda, any more than there is an average man 
(having sex with 7.1 partners in his lifetime and raising 2.3 children and, 
at any one time, 1.4 dogs and 1.3 cats). Talking about the typical broda is 
a way of saying very complicated things about the set of brodas or its 
members or its mass (maybe "and" rather thna "or")in a fairly simple way 
(note how seldom anyone tries to completely unpack these sentences and what 
messes they get into when they do it -- even if they do it more seriously 
that making it absentence about an individual). In the case of 
typical/stereotypical//archetypical -- as opposed to statistical -- the 
claims are probably subjective or, at most, cliquish, to add to the p-roblems 
of unpacking what is said. 
Probably the only logical point here is: don't infer from {lo'e broda cu 
brode ije lo'e broda cu brodi} to {lo'e broda cu brode gu'e brodi}.