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

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 13:27:42 +0000

la pycyn cusku di'e

> What does this have
>to do with what we have been talking about (though I admit I may have lost
>the original point after all this time and all the gymnastics that you have
>gone through to avoid giving clear answers)?

I assure you that I am not doing it on purpose.

>But the cases we were discussing were -- I thought -- about getting one 
>token
>of a type out of a set of such tokens -- each of them being in fact an 
>event
>type.

Getting tokens out is done with le/lo. I don't think we
disagree there. {ro lo broda} gets each token from {lo'i broda},
{ro lo nu broda} gets each token from {lo'i nu broda}.

>That still seems to me to be inherently extensional for all that the
>extension is made up of intensional objects.

Indeed, le/lo are always extensional. On the other hand:

{lo'e broda} gets the type from {lo'i broda} and
{lo'e nu broda} gets the type from {lo'i nu broda}.

For any given set, there is one type. (Of course there are
sub-types to go with the respective sub-sets.)

>Maybe we
>need to set up some terminology so that the various sorts of intensions are
>sorted out.

Ok.

>I don't know what the intension of a set is unless it is the intension of 
>the
>expression whose extension is the set. Calling that the sense or 
>designation
>would take it out of the mass of things going on here. It is an 
>intensional
>object, meaning that various operations -- fronting, quantifier binding, 
>and
>Leibniz's law -- don't apply in expressions referring to it.

The way I understand it, fronting, quantifier binding, etc don't
apply when you _use_ an intension. When you _talk about_ it, you
tokenize it. {le ka ce'u broda} is used to talk about the intension.
The intension is in this case a token. With {lo'e broda} I make use
of the intension, I don't refer to the intension.

>Let's keep
>"intension" as a general term for objects which are referred to by
>expressions with those properties.

Ok. We can say that {broda} is always intensional.
But {lo broda} and {lo ka broda} are always extensional
(one referring to broda-tokens and the other to ka-tokens).
{lo'e broda} is the way I found to keep the intensionality
of the broda-type at sumti level. {lo ka broda} maintains
the intensionality of {broda}, (it is extensional for
ka) but it is the wrong kind of object when we have a place
that requires broda-tokens or broda-types.

>Types and tokens are another matter entirely, though perhaps practically
>related. The lowest level token is a concrete individual at a given 
>moment.
>>From there on up, the type relative to a given token is an abstract and
>quasi-intensional object which the relative token manifests or however you
>want to put it.

And how do you make use of that type? (I don't mean talk
about it, but make use of it.)

>The two share some properties and these are defining for the
>type -- and they typically "have" them in different ways, though the
>terminology here is muddier than usual: the token typically is subject of 
>the
>property, the type contains the property (to take what seems to me the 
>least
>confusing pair of possibilities).

Yes, you are _talking about_ the type. I'd like to
see some uses.

>The quasiness of the intensionality comes
>about from the fact that some real-world truths affect the issue of what
>tokens may fall under a given type: the fact that Jill is Jack's bitchy
>sister means that the proposition that Jack's bitchy sister is asleep falls
>under the same type as the proposition that Jill is asleep, even though 
>they
>are not the same proposition. I take it that {du'u la djil sipna} is the
>predicate satisfied by all the propositions that fall under the same
>proximate type as that Jill is asleep does. I suppose that the sense of 
>that
>predicate expression is pretty close to just that, the property of falling
>under that proximate type.

Ok, as I said before, I am not very clear about the sense
of the predicate headed by {du'u}. My instinct says that
{lo'i du'u ...} has only one member, and in one-member sets
making the type-token distinction is probably hair-splitting.
But if {lo'i du'u ...} has many members then {du'u} should
behave like any other {broda}.

>Why not, in complete generality, use {le du'u ce'u broda} in this case
>(assuming that this refers to the sense corresponding to the reference lo'i
>broda, i.e., the sense of {broda}, which it ought do)?

That is how I would refer to the intension, yes. (I would use
{ka} rather than {du'u}, but that's beside the point.)
I use {lo'e} not to refer to intensions but to make use
of them:

ta simlu le ka ce'u sfofa
That appears to have the property of being a sofa.

ta simsa lo'e sfofa
That is like a sofa.

I can't use {le ka ce'u sfofa} with {simsa}, because {simsa}
compares same level objects, not objects with properties.
I can use {le ka ce'u sfofa} with {simlu} because {simlu}
is an object-property relationship.

>I suppose that
>"when I don't want to quantify over the extesion of the set" means "when I
>want to talk about the sense of the expression delimiting to the set rather
>than to the set itself or its members"

It means "when I want to use the sense", not "talk about the sense".

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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