Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2002 11:54:55 EDT

In a message dated 7/5/2002 6:42:06 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> >{le remei} refers to a mass based on a two-membered set.
> 
> Whereas for me it refers to a two-membered mass. If we can't
> get past this stumbling block, we'll continue talking past
> each other.

Well, I am trying to get something consistent out of all this mass stuff 
(perhaps a hopeless task given the number of times we have gone round about 
one aspect or another of it); in particular I am trying to get {gunma}, the 
{lVi}s, and {joi} -- and {mei} --into some kind of harmony (Why don't we have 
a word for "set" anymore?). this one may not work, but the next one to try 
seems even worse. What is emerging is the fairly clear evidence that masses 
are intensional, with all the horrors that that entails: two masses with 
exactly the same mebers may not be identical. And from that I think it 
follows as a possibility that two groups of people with the same properties 
individually may comprise two masses that have different properties. That 
is, the relation between the properties of the members of a mass (including 
whether they are members of that mass) and the properties of the mass is an 
intensional one -- not generally reducible to any direct reading from fact to 
fact without going through at least the intensionality of the definition of 
the mass. I'd sure like to find another way to do this.

<>I suspect this is English again, {lei bolci cu crino} is true -- at least
>this has been said authoritatively several times over the last 47 years -- 
>if
>even one ball is green (sometimes if even one ball has a green spot).

Yes, unfortunately it has been said authoritatively too many
times. I never saw actual usage take advantage of this "feature"
though.>

Well, it has mainly been used to generate apparent paradoxes. But the point 
of them has been to stress that they are only apparent. It seems that what 
has been said authoritatively for nearly fifty years has to carry a lot of 
weight. I think we have to work very hard within that framework to undermine 
it (though the rest of the problems with masses will remain even if this one 
-- which has an easy work-around -- is cured).

<>However, this is still
>off my point, which is in the this case case, that even when there are a
>hundred and one balls, the mass with just one of those balls as its only
>member can still be lei bolci.

In official Lojban, yes, {[pisu'o] lei bolci} is some part of
the mass of balls, so it can refer to the one ball.>

But this is the list for official Lojban -- other languages can use engelang, 
at least for a starter.

<But even in official Lojban I have never before seen the claim
that {le 101mei} could refer to the mass of one ball. It seems
outrageous and it would seem to make {mei} fairly useless.>

Well, the fact that it makes masses fairly useless is surely something in its 
favor from the rhetorical point of view (if you happen to think that masses 
are useful beyond the simplest versions of cooperation). It seems required 
by consistency with the other pieces -- which run off in several directions, 
of course, but majorly go this way: {le panopamei} means "the mass I have in 
mind of 101 things." For this to make any sense at all, there has to be more 
than one such mass, so that I can pick one to have in mind, and the only way 
I can see to do that, short of intensionality (which I am trying to avoid, if 
possible, remember) is to allow submasses to count.

<Well, I guess it is possible to set up a classification scheme[of how the 
properties of a mass are related to the properties of its members] but in the 
end you need to examine the particular context before deciding in which class 
a given property falls. It's not something you could put in a dictionary.>

I would think it was a very important thing to put into a dictionary, even if 
it had several clauses for different situations. Are you saying that there 
are no rules for relating a property of a mass to those of its members? But 
many contrary cases have been cited -- and regularly are even in the 
semantically deficient Book.

<>The question about age in a mass raises a nasty question, that of 
>identifying
>a mass (or distinguishing one mass from another, individuating a mass).
>Depending on how that is done (and there are a number of ways of doing it).
>We can a variety of answers.

Exactly. And the same works to some extent for every property,
some being of course more clear cut than others.>

But that does not touch either point. Once we know what the mass is, there 
is presumably (well, I'm going to presume it for now, until I have to give it 
up) a clear way to relate it to any property in question. And nothing is 
said about how to identify wht the mass is.

<I hope I have not agreed with that, since I think that the set of
exactly the members is the relevant one, if we need to talk
of any set at all. And the place structure I had proposed for
{mei}, which you said you liked, had the mass of cardinality n
in x1, and a supermass (of indeterminate cardinality) in x2.>

Sorry that I misunderstood what you said, especially that I misread your 
definition.

<>Why we would want to
>say that the mass is also a mass of other sets is simply to make {lei gerku
>cu gunma le'i gerku} true -- as it intuitively is.

{le'i gerku} is the set of dogs I have in mind, and {piro lei gerku}
is the mass of the very same dogs. {pisu'o lei gerku} is some part
of that mass. {lei gerku cu gunma le'i gerku} is true with any of
the two quantifiers for {lei}. Since it is true with {piro} it
has perforce to be true with {pisu'o}. I don't see that any of this
requires that the mass have different members to those of the set.>

My bad. I meant {lo'i gerku} (and I did it more than once!). Noticce I did 
take care to eliminate the non-veridical part of {lei}.

<>I'd go with: "enough members of the group are tired".>
>
>As usual -- the question Lojban doesn't ask -- enough for what? Can you 
>come
>up with something other than "to declare that the whole mass is tired"?

No, I certainly can't give you a percentage. But there is no magic
formula that will tell you how many members have to be tired for the
group to be considered to be tired, that goes with the context.
Even for one person, there is no rule that will tell you when they
are tired, that also depends on the context.>

I didn't expect you could; I was just asking whether this could be tied to 
any other properties. I didn't expect it could be, but it is rather 
unsatisfactory at the moment (but "enough"s often are).