Subject: Re: [lojban] pro-sumti question In-Reply-To F220eoZTR5IwNdJiRcJ00006c79@hotmail.

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2002 08:43:14 EDT

In a message dated 7/6/2002 5:58:51 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> As long as people don't take those rules too literally,
> that's ok. But Lojbanists tend to soon forget the spirit
> of the rule and run with the letter, with disastrous results.
> (We tend to read the rule written for humans as if it had
> been written for machines.)
> 

Painfully true and so the more reason to write the rules very carefully in 
the beginning, leaving very little to "spirit." I think this can be done 
generally in these cases, though there are many hard ones -- "win", for 
example -- especially outside games with rules.

<<Take the eating case. The rule here should give something
like this:

ko'a citka ko'e
fo'a citka fo'e
ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

But this one will also probably be true:

ko'a joi fo'a citka ko'e e fo'e

This one, however, should be false:

ko'a e fo'a citka ko'e joi fo'e

All of that follows from the semantics of {citka}, whatever
the sum rules may say.>>

I should think that that is just about what the rules should say -- plus, of 
course, that when the eaten is quantized, the quantities are to be summed 
aritmetically by category. I wonder if we need de-massing rules as well. 
What does carry over from mass to individual? Is Division a worse fallacy 
than Composition? Again, I suspect we can make rules here, and, indeed, the 
remarks about when {joi} can be replaced by {e} are along that line.