Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [jboske] Quantifiers, Existential Import, and all that stuff

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Mar 2002 16:53:03 EST

In a message dated 3/7/2002 3:15:38 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Yes, {me'iro broda} = {da'asu'o broda} must have existential
> import. When ro = no, both {me'iro} and {da'asu'o} fail,
> making the statement false

What a relief! They'll never be false for that reason.

<But it does! {ro broda cu brode} is A- and {me'iro broda cu brode}
is O+, and each is the negation of the other.
Similarly {no broda cu brode} is E- and {su'o broda cu brode}
is I+, each the negation of the other.

What you cannot do, and I agree, is negate {ro lo su'o broda}
to obtain {me'iro broda}, or negate {no lo su'o broda} to
obtain {su'o broda}, but if you look carefully, I never wrote
that.>

But this assumes that {lo su'o broda} is different from {lo ro broda}, which 
it ain't. To be consistent, you should probably not collapse {su'o lo su'o 
broda} since that breaks the pattern you are establishing (misleading). 

<You're exasperating sometimes. It is not a falsehood the way
I understand {ro}, of course. {ro broda} means {no broda}
iff {lo'i broda} is the empty set.>

Speaking of exasperating! You persist in MISunderstanding {ro} though you 
have been corrected God knows how many times over just about all the years 
you have been in the Lojban game. If {lo'i broda} refers to the empty set, 
any basic sentence containing {lo broda} or some variant on it is false (or 
meaningless or however you want to deal with it) because one of its 
presuppositions (that {lo broda} refers to some things) is false. Remember 
the assumed quantifier on {lo} is {su'o} which cannot be larger than the size 
of the set being drawn from.

<I don't follow that. {no broda cu brode} does not have existential
import in my system, it is E-. {no lo su'o broda cu brode} does,
it is E+.>

As I keep saying, since the two are exactly the same, if one of them has 
import so does the other, or if one doesn't neither does the other. I 
suppose we could make the case that, since they use different words, they are 
different, but that seems to me too small a difference, since they refer to 
the same thing directly(and it would only work if used consistently). 
Quantifier + {da} overtly refers to a different thing (the universal "thing" 
set) and so is more usefully taken to be the non-importing form. Personally, 
even there, I would like that {da poi broda} were still importing and 
restrict the free forms to {ro da broda naja brode} and the like, but I know 
I can't get that to fly.