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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 10 Sep 2002 12:06:01 EDT

In a message dated 8/22/2002 3:53:52 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> > > 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}.
> 
> That's arguable, because negation in English does not
> normally have such scope: "Some things are not known by Jack"
> is not an inversion and denial of "Jack knows some things".
> My suspicion is that "that Jill is asleep" is a singular
> term in English, not an existentially quantified one.
> >>

Well, if "that Jill is asleep" is a singular term in English (which seems 
plausible), then the scope of the negation is irrelevant, but the problem is 
about Lojban, where it is relevant. And the question then is which meaning is 
involved if "that" clauses are quantified. The straightforward quantified 
case does not seem to me to be very informative, since the English rules for 
quantifiers and negations are rather different from the Lojban. The crucial 
thing seems to me to be that, if Jack does not know that Jill is asleep, then 
he does not know any proposition that amounts to that claim, not just that he 
does not know some particular ones of that sort -- but does know others. 
That, of course, relies on my understanding of what {du'u la djil sipna} 
means, and you may (and, apparently, do) disagree with that. However, it is 
a predicate, so intended to apply to many things (even if it may not live up 
to intentions) and I see no reason why it does not do so here. 

<<
>there
>is no quantifier place, quantifiers are optional and so we can just leave
>them off.

Can we really? Can we use {lo broda} and NOT mean {su'o lo broda}?
Yes, but it takes special circumstances, because the *convention* is to take 
{lo broda} as {su'o lo broda}. The *grammar* does not require quantifiers 
(what it means to say that they are optional). And, no, I cannot whip up a 
plausible case on the spur of the moment -- and, more importantly, in the 
limited context of an e-mail message.

<<
>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'm not sure about supporting it from the text, there may be
support for any position in it, but I'm not an interpreter
of the true doctrine, I create my own. :)
Not really a smiley matter, since it tends to confuse the issue of how to do 
it in Lojban rather than Xorban. Returning to that (the nominally specified 
topic here):

<<
As for practice, you know how I do it: I use {lo'e} for the types
and {lo/le} for the tokens. ({le'e} is also a type, obviously, but
I'm not sure yet how it would/could/should work in my scheme.)
I am not sure that this is how I would describe what you do, but that is 
largely because I have yet to get a clear grip on (or a clear statement from 
you about) what your usage amounts to. This descriptions seems different 
from others you have presented, but that may be just the differences in the 
predicates involved. If I read what you say literally (which is probably 
grossly unfair -- but no more so than expecting someone to work out what the 
metaphor is wihtout some serious help) then lo'e nu broda is a/the (?) type 
of which all members of lo'i nu broda are tokens and lo/le nu broda is/are 
particular token(s) of that or some type of lo'i nu broda. This leaves the 
question of how to refer to the members of lo'i nu broda itself. If, as it 
seems you have it, they are just the tokens themselves, then they are not nu 
broda, since that is abstract and the token events are concrete -- which goes 
against {lo} anyhow, if not {le} (which might, I suppose, be systematically 
used for specific concrete token events). 
In *your* scheme I suppose that {le'e} is to {lo'e} as {le} is to {lo} -- 
though that still leaves the impression that there is more than one type 
under the heading {nu broda}, so I probably have that wrong.

<<
>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.

But why not do the same for dogs and chocolates then? Why are
they priviledged (or underpriviledged rather) with respect to
events? Isn't one of the claims of Lojban that they are treated
the same?
I am not sure I follow this at all. Dogs and chocolates are different from 
events in that they are concrete and events are abbstract: or rather {gerku} 
and {cakla} doe not claim on their faces to be abstract (and so, by default, 
are assumed to be concrete, since good Gricean manners would require noting 
such a significant feature) while {nu broda}, etc. do have this on their 
faces. I am unclear here what the privilege involved is. The whole point of 
my argument is just that like things be treated alike: classes are classes of 
things satisfying the predicate defining the class, so members of classes of 
concreta are concrete, those of abstracta are abstract.
I suspect a deep (too deep for me to dig out so far) confusion here: maybe 
between concrete and abstract v. token and type, maybe between classes and 
other abstract entities, maybe something else entirely . And I am not sure 
which of us is confused -- or whether both of us in antagonistic ways. 

<<
>(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.)

The type (the intension) is in the meaning of the word, of
course. The question is how you access it. Not with lo/le,
I say. lo/le give you the extension, what you quantify over,
the members of the class one by one.

Or maybe between type and intension and meaning (sense)? I don't get this at 
all.
Quantification does not enter ere at all in any interesting way. Remember, 
in Lojban, all entities are on the same level in the grammar, so it is as 
easy to quantify over the members of a set of types or intensions (not 
necessarily the same thing, by the way) as of a set of dogs. One hopes that 
the type of a thing is not in the meaning of the word for that thing, because 
that will lead to an infinite regress, circling forever around to get out the 
type, given only tokens. Unless you wan to fall back on the bootstrapping 
empirical procedure of science and leave a forever incompletely specified 
type -- which makes talk of types pretty senseless against other locutions.