Subject: Re: [lojban] x3 of dasni

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 9 Aug 2002 17:03:23 EDT

In a message dated 8/9/2002 10:47:31 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> So you would claim that:
> 
> ko'a dasni le boxfo so'e kosta
> He wears the blanket as most coats.
> 
> You would claim that:
> 
> There is some coat x, such that he wears the blanket as x.
> 
> I don't think that's what "he wears the blanket as a coat"
> means. I don't think {ko'a dasni le boxfo lo'e kosta}
> entails {ko'a dasni le boxfo da}. To me {lo'e kosta} is
> similar to {zi'o} in this regard, it changes the predicate
> reducing the number of places by one.
> 
>>
Filling any place with any sumti reduces the number of places on the 
predicate by one -- the one filled (see endless discussions of {ce'u} and 
{ka/du'u}). You can't -- as you seem to do here -- have it both ways: that 
the place is a null and that it is significant what go in that place. 
Clearly it is not like {zi'o}, since {dasni fi l* kosta} is different from 
{dasni fi l* sjkaci} (ko'd'd wear it in a different place, for one thing.)

I don't claim that he wears it as most coats, although that is probably right 
-- and the usual meaning of {lo'e} (not the Lojban-free Spanish translation) 
would agree with that more or less. I also don't require that there is one 
particular coat that he wears it like: particular quantifiers do not 
distinguish -- even in logic -- between singular and plural. But your 
rhetoric relies on us finding exactly one -- which no one claimed (though it 
is implicit in some of your comments about finding it and so on).

<<
I want to understand the claim.
You say that there is a coat x (even if we don't care which one,
and even if we can't find it) such that that coat x is in
relationship {dasni} with ko'a and the blanket. I don't want
to say there is any such coat. If you present any coat to me
and ask whether he is wearing the blanket as that coat, I would
tend to say no, he is not wearing it as that coat.

It is a tautology that there is always a most probable thing to fill any 
slot, if anything at all does, so take that as the one (notice we are no 
nearer to finding which one it is here, except in some metaphysical sense). 
If ko'a is wearing something1 as a coat, then either there is something such 
that it is a coat and ko'a is wearing something1 as it, or else the whole is 
an intentional context out of which the referent is raised (and should be 
labelled {tu'a} or otherwise marked), in which case, what is involved is 
still a coat but not necessarily one in this world -- a possible coat, more 
or less. The latter is yucky (though probably ultimately right -- but we 
aren't clearly forced to it yet), so I'll stick with the former until a 
serious problem arises.

<<
Yes, I go with the event too. I thought that the place where an
event took place had to contain all the participants of the event.
But it rarely does, except in the case of really physical punch-in-the-eye 
events. The event of founding a nation doesn't contain the nation (though it 
is usually -- not always -- contained in the nation). As noted, the event of 
interest here does not contain its third member, whatever it is (if it were a 
coat and around, ko'a would probably wear it rather than the blanket). 

cowan:
<<
That is, for each coat, it is false that he is wearing the blanket as
*that coat*. I think this is entirely correct.
So dasni3 is intentional. Yuck! 

<<
Perhaps dasni3 ought to be a set; the gismu list calls it a "type", and types
are sets of tokens (or values). So:

ko'a dasni le boxfo lo'i kosta

meaning that he1 wears the (specific) blanket as if it belonged to the
set of coats.

Worse and worse. I took "of type" to be a figger of speech, since Lojban has 
historically resisted any attempt to deal seriously with tokens and types, as 
witness the next clause: types are not sets of tokens (or, at least, people 
who try to make that work have a hell of time getting the easiest stuff out 
and never get to the interesting parts -- not to mention the incongruity of 
creating a new type by creating a new token *of that type*.)
But happily it turns out you don't really mean that, but rather "as though it 
belonged to the set of coats" which amounts to "as though it were a coat." 
Intentional for sure now.

<<
". If I say that the Andromeda Galaxy is
more massive than the Milky Way Galaxy, where does the event occur?

Not a hard case, since the two of them are in space, so any superspace to the 
two will do. Where does John's dream of Mary take place? Or six being the 
product of two and three? Or, to return to the point, ko'a's wearing a 
blanket as though it were a coat?

<<
Statements about space (or time) relationships don't
themselves have a privileged location in space (or time).
Yeah, and those too.

<<
"x1 wears x2 as if it were an instance
of type x3", in which case I would use {lo'e} for the type

Well, if {lo'e} were an archetype, this would make sense (contrary-to-fact, 
of course) But now it is too late to avoid intentions. Pity!