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

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 16:57:13 +0000

>>> <[email-masked]> 10/30/01 09:56pm >>>
[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?  

Yes

#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 sowin 
#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.  

But there is no other member. lo'e broda is the sole member of lo'i broda.
On the other more mainstream ontology, either (a) there is no such
thing as lo'e broda, and lo'i broda is many-membered, or (b) when the
gadri is not lo'e/le'e, the selbri means "is a version of lo'e broda".

#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 

I don't follow that reasoning

#and some which almost none have are typical.  

or that

#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.  

I agree with all this, I think. 

#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}.

First of all, hang on: if what you're saying is addressed to me, then I hadexplicitly
said to John that I don't think lo'e should be understood in terms of typicality
or averageness -- at least not definitionally.

Second, whichever interpretation of lo'e one goes for, inferences of any sort
about lo'e broda could be pretty iffy in some cases. So again, I agree with
your moral, I think. (except I can't remember what "gu'e" means...)

--And.