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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 22 Aug 2002 15:07:18 EDT

In a message dated 8/22/2002 1:02:45 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
Oops! Interference from Spanish "ignorar", which is usually
non-volitional. I meant "is ignorant of". I always forget
about that one... Since you have quibbles about {na'e}, let's
change the example to {naku}:
I figured it was something like that (cognates are not our friends). I 
didn't quibble about {na'e}, merely used it strictly correctly.

<<
> 
> lo du'u la djil sipna kei naku se djuno la djak
> =/= That Jill is asleep is not known by Jack.
> 
> The Lojban is true and the English false.
> 
>>
I agree they are not equal, because the English us a translation of {lo du'u 
la djil sipna kei na se djuno la djak}, inversion and denial of {la djak 
djuno lo du'u la djil sipna}. I'm not even sure how one would say the Lojban 
in English (one of the reasons for Lojban, after all). Something like "There 
are claims that amount to that Jill is asleep that Jack does not know," 
which, as often noted, is almost surely true.

<<
>But, on the face of it, {tu'o} IS a quantifier and I have not seen anything
>yet to suggest otherwise.

{tu'o} is the {zi'o} of MEX. It anihilates an operand place, so
I use it to anihilate a quantifier place.

Oh, is that how it works -- the notes don't sound like that. But then there 
is no quantifier place, quantifiers are optional and so we can just leave 
them off. That, of course, does have an interpretation, but about the most 
inspecific possible. Is {tu'o} more so? How?

<<
My bad again, this time indirectly induced by you. You wrote
a couple of messages back: "Why is {mi nelci lo nu mi citka
lo cakla} true if on one occasion I liked eating a chocolate.
The occasions don't enter in, as I have been saying for a while
now, this is a set of intensions, not extensions - of events,
not occasions; of tokens, not of types. Why would it be true
if I didn't like chocolate?" You had intensions-events-tokens
vs. extensions-occasions-types, and I incorporated "token" as
the contrast to "instance".

Yup, my bad -- speed, bad typing skills and no editing take there toll. 

<<
>Yes, of course {re nu mi citka lo cakla} can be used to refer to occasions, 
>just as {mi citka cakla} can be (but need not be and is not inherently).

So it is not clear to me whether you now think (against what
you had said earlier) that my liking one chocolate on one
particular occasion is enough to make {mi nelci lo nu citka
lo cakla} true or not.

In the context of this dispute -- which is overtly about general claims -- it 
would not. If the question is whether you have every likd eating a 
chocolate, then clearly it would. The fact that these can be expressed by 
exacty the same surface sentence type is just one of things about language. 
But it rarely confuses anyone but an occasional philosopher, who then has to 
undergo linguistic analysis.

<<
> We can guarantee token readings (occasions) by fiddling at the beginning 
>{le
>ca nu} and the like pull it down, as does a {nau} inside, I think.

The {nau} should not, as there are types of events that occur
here and now. Perhaps {ca'a nu}? But if it were a {ka'e} vs {ca'a}
thing, the same distinction can be made with {ca'a cakla} vs
{ka'e cakla}.
{nau} in every context correlates the event with the speaker. I think that 
should be an adequate peg, but if I'm wrong, then drop that case. The others 
still work. And {ca'a} probably does, too. Of course, if {ca'a} works then 
so does {ka'a}, bringing it to one of intermediate abstract cases (token to 
some types, type to some tokens), the realm of the inherently capable or so. 
Still somewhat abstract, I think, but not so much so as athe undetermined.

<<
So {lo'i nu broda} sometimes is the set of type {nu broda}s and
in other contexts it is the set of token {nu broda}s? Or is
it always a set that includes both type and token {nu broda}s?
(My position is that it is always a set of token {nu broda}s
only, independently of context.)
An interesting position, but how would you support it from the text? Or in 
practice?
I think that lo'i nu broda is a set of abstracts always and that we can use 
reference to these abstracts to refer to occassions tht full under them. 
Just as I can use the world "A," which refers to a type, to refer to various 
tokens (at various levels even). Of course, I don't expect you to accept the 
assumption of the analogy, but, believe me, making token-types work ios a lot 
easier this way than the other (how do you build types out of tokens unless 
you somehow have a criterion for their being "the same." i.e. have a type in 
utero at least.)