Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 06 Jul 2002 17:39:15 +0000

la pycyn cusku di'e

>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.

Could you give an example? In what would they differ?

>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.

Two groups of the same people? Like the reading club and the
hockey team, which happen to have the same members? But that
would be like saying that the teacher and Bob's mom, which
happen to be the same person, 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 can't see how you could, but I'd love to see the details.

>{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.

There are infinitely many possible masses of 101 things that don't
involve intensionality, so I don't understand what you mean here.
You seem to be saying that somehow the 101 things get fixed first
and then {le} is used to select from masses of those things, but
that is not right. {le} selects from all posible 101-somes, and
there are plenty to choose from. {lo'i panopamei}, the set of all
101-somes, is a very large set. (And in any case the idea that
for {le broda} to make any sense there has to be more than one
broda is not right either.)

><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?

Intuitive general rules, yes. Steadfast rules, I doubt it.

>But
>many contrary cases have been cited -- and regularly are even in the
>semantically deficient Book.

Try to make explicit the rule for weights for example, which is
one of the clearest cases. We have something like:

ko'a grake ko'e ko'i
fo'a grake fo'e fo'i
ko'a joi fo'a grake le sumji be ko'e bei fo'e ko'i no'u fo'i

It's hard to give a general rule because somehow you have to specify
that ko'i has to be equal to fo'i, and you have to select the x2
place as the one that gets additioned. We can't say for a general
{broda} that it is in the same class as {grake} and leave it at
that, unless the place structures are very similar.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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