Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: I like chocolate

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 13:12:25 EDT

In a message dated 8/20/2002 11:31:12 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> The point I'm trying to make does not depend on the chocolate.
> I could use {mi nelci le nu citka} and {mi nelci lo nu citka}.
> "I like the particular event of eating that I have in mind"
> and "there is/are some event(s) of eating that I like". None
> of them corresponds to the most common sense of "I like to eat"
> or "I enjoy eating".
>>
Well, this does seem to be off the point, which has been pretty consistently 
about chocolate, but, rather surpringly, it does help explain what I think 
you may be driving at. You want to distinguish between "There are events of 
eating that I like" and "I like it that there are events of eating" or 
something like that. Let's see if that works out for explaining your 
position.

<<
> mi ta'e nelci lo nu mi citka lo cakla
> Habitually it is the case that there is some eating of
> chocolate that I like.
>>>
>What is habituaol, etc. is not there
>being events but my liking some of the events (there are always events of 
>any
>sort you care to come up with).

So you would take the quantifier outside of the scope of ta'e:

da poi nu mi citka lo cakla zo'u mi ta'e nelci da
For some event x of me eating chocolate: habitually I like x.

No, that's not what you're saying. Where would you put the ta'e
relative to {da poi nu}/{lo nu}?
When prefixing is implicit, tenses have to be the outermost item except for 
negation, thus the quantifier must be inside them. But since it clearly 
modifies {nelci}, not the 
quantified claim, the quantifier cannot come between these two. So the 
quantifier must be restricted to the scope after {nelci}, so that fits. But 
I am not sure that that is what "I like to eat" means either -- it may be 
that the abstraction here is {li'i} rather than {nu} or {du'u}

<<
[On the quantifier of du'u:]
>I am at a loss to see the advantage of {tu'o}, "a non-specific, elliptical
>number" over {lo}, which amounts to an unspecified number.

I take {tu'o} as a null, a non-number. The cmavo list has
both definitions for it. We went over this already in the past.
On the ground that every Lojban word has exactly one meaning, however hard 
that may be to describe in English, I take it that these "two definitions" 
are in fact various stabs at a single one. Nulls are usually things stuck 
into places that have to be filled but whose filling does not on this 
occasion affect the results. So you stick just any old thing in there, but a 
thing of the right sort. Thus, {tu'o} is "any old number, it doesn't matter 
which, so long as it fills the place." We have been over it before and I see 
no reason to change my view. (unless, of course, this is a change already -- 
I didn't check back to see what I said before).

<<
>The members of lo'i du'u la djil sipna are all the propositions that in 
>fact
>amount to claims that Jill sleeps. Since they are intensional, the
>identities that in fact apply -- such as that Jill is Jack's sister and 
>that
>sleeping is non-traumatic temporary loss of consciousness -- do not reduce
>them to a single item.

So would you say, for example:

le du'u le mensi be la djak cu sipna cu du'u la djil sipna

I don't have a strong position on this, I'm just trying to
figure it out. Doesn't this sort of kill the ability of du'u
to provide intensional contexts?
Yes, I would say that in the imagined circumstances. Propositions are 
intensional but sets (and so predications) are not. If Jill isn't Jack's 
sister the, of course, I would say "No" to your question. If Jack doesn't 
know that Jill is his sister, then your proposition would not be one of ones 
that Jack knows. But notice Jill can be Jack's imaginary sister without 
affecting the example at all (well, aside from some possible problems about 
knowing). 

This all sounds like the intensional/extensional problem is largely a red 
herring (which I probably introduced myself in trying to figure out what 
xorxes was trying to do). It seems that what is really involved is a scope 
question on quantifiers, quite aside from intensionality -- since the same 
question keeps being raised at each level of intensionality and having an 
intensional place that also requires an intensional context sumti in it seems 
overkill. But all that is needed from intensionality is the lack of fronting 
or quantifying over, not the whole nine yards (I'm not sure how the identity 
condition would work here anyhow, nor where the worlds are to come in). 

How to satisfy xorxes within present Lojban, if possible. I'll skip the 
intensional place gambit, since I know that won't satisfy him (and I don't 
like it much myself, except as a last hope). I could look and see whether 
there is a device already for restricting scope, as {ku} does for {na} and 
tenses. But {ku} won't work with quantifiers apparently and nothing else 
suggests itself. I also don't think that multiplying items in the place will 
help, for example, {mi nelci le nu da du'u mi citka lo cakla} will simply 
lead to a repeat of the argument: there is now an event of something being a 
proposition that I eat chocolate such that I like it (the event). But, of 
course, I don't like an event or a proposition and, further, there is no way 
to identify WHICH proposition -- or event -- I like: xorxes; central and 
repeated argument, I think.

But is that argument right at all? I''ve been accepting with some misgivings, 
but none I could formulate in the context of the intensional/extensional line 
(not that they objections weren't there then, just that they were harder for 
me to see in that context). It is certainly OK in the case of quantifiers 
within the intensional context, but what about quantifiers over intensional 
contexts. Is it wrong that {mi nelci lo nu mi citka lo cakla} is equivalent 
to {da poi nu mi citka lo cakla zo'u mi nelci da}? The appearance that it is 
comes from asking questions like "Which one is it then?" and expecting 
answers like "The one last Thursday or the one in my dream last night," which 
clearly won't work, whereas the appropriate answers are "The most general 
one, simply that I am eating chocolate" or "A very specific one like that I 
am eating a Hershey bar (with almonds) on a sunny afternoon in Seville with a 
little bird flutterng around to get scraps ......" An event in the {nu} 
sense is an abstraction, the class of them contains many abstractions, all of 
them more or less of they same basic type (given facts as they are -- the 
class is in this world, after all). The manifestations of these abstractions 
play only a very derivative role here: presumably if you like eating 
chocolate (are in the like-relation to some member of the class of 
me-eating-chocolate events) then you will generally enjoy occasions of 
chocolate eating (have the feelings that might prompt you to say {oinai} or 
even {ui} while doing it). So, of course there is an event that I like: that 
I am eating chocolate (and perhaps some more specific members of the set). 
When I am telling you what I like, it is probably appropriate to use {le nu} 
then; when I am reporting on someone else {lo nu} seems safer, since his 
particulars may not be obvious (if we get it by observing, we may miss 
details that are significant to him; if we get it from him directly he may, 
for a variety of reasons, not give the full details). So, in fact, the 
equivalence hold no problems at all once we figure out what events we are 
talking about. And the need for {lo'e} again comes down to a case of 
intensional contexts rightly understood.