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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2002 15:28:47 EDT

In a message dated 9/11/2002 8:30:45 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
I assure you that I am not doing it on purpose.
Not purposing -- and following through -- on being clear is more than enough, 
thank you.

<<
> 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}.
>>
Terminologically, I do disagree. Calling the members of a set tokens is just 
plain misleading without some contextually given type. And {broda} by itself 
does not do that. That aside, I am glad we do agree on this basic stuff (I 
wasn't sure a while ago in the burble about {lo'e} and quantification and so 
on).

<<
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.)

You mean in Xorban, of course, not Lojban (I have to throw that in from time 
to time to keep others from developing your bad habits). I suppose you mean 
the proximate type, since there are countless one above that, of which this 
one is a relative token. That is the type of which all the member of the set 
are tokens, that of which the leading case of {du'u ce'u broda} is just "is a 
token of this type." "gets from" seems a bad locution since it suggests that 
the set exists before the type, which is not likely, since there are surely 
sets whose members do not manifest anything like a meaningful type (OK, this 
is controversial, but plausible for present purposes, I should think).

<<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.
What does "use an intension" mean? What can you do with them? {le du'u ce'u 
broda} refers to a property (or some properties, of course), using the 
expression is a way of talking about that property. The property is an 
intension. We can apply it to various things, successfully or not, 
depending. These maneuvers come to fruition in our saying various 
things:{ko'a broda}, for example, or some of the more complex forms that 
amount to the same thing, some of them referring explicitly to the property 
involved (but I can't figure out how to say, fairly literally "it has the 
property of being broda" in Lojban -- nor Xorban, for that matter). 

<<
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.
Why would we say (and what would we mean if we said) that {broda} is always 
intensional? {broda} is a word, a predicate. It has an referent 
(extension), the set of things to which it can be truly applied. It has a 
sense (intension), that by virtue of which the things in the extension get 
there, brodaness, generally. But {broda} is neither intensional nor 
extensional. To be sure, for some predicates, the members of the extension 
set are themselves intensional objects, properties or propositions or events, 
but that doesn't affect the status of the predicate word.
{lo ...} always refers to things in the reference class of {...}, the 
extension of {...}. Whether lo ... (the thing(s), not the expression) is 
extensional or not depends upon what sort of things are referred to by {...}. 
I suppose that, in either case, what is referred to is tokens of the ... 
type -- if there is one, of course.
But now I don't get the next move at all: {lo'e ...} keeps the intentionality 
of the ... type at the sumti level. Does this mean anything more than that 
you use {lo'e ...} to refer to ... types, which are inherently intensional? 
It seems that you think it does, but it is unclear to me what that more is.
{lo ka ...} does not maintain the intensionality of {...} because {...} does 
not have any, unless you mean that {lo ka ...} (I do wish you'd use {du'u} 
after all the work we went through to get it straightened out) refers to the 
sense (intension) of {...}. That is generally true -- or near enough for 
now. But it is also trivial and does not get us any for'ader. 
A place that requires ... tokens is presumably filled by using {lo ...} -- 
isn't that what you just said? Is there a place -- in Lojban -- that 
requires being filled by ... types? I couldn't find any. Lojban seems (to 
me sometimes) to be defective in nt having a way to talk about types and 
tokens and so we are left with the ambiguity of questions like "How many 
books are on the shelf?"(relevant to another current discussion) and so on. 
I don't see your moves here as dealing with that issue. But then, I don't 
see them as dealing with any issue at all clearly.

<<
>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.)
Meaning (yet again) what? How do we use tokens? Well, at the lowest level, 
however is appropriate for the sort of thing they are -- dig with a shovel, 
pet a cat, solve a problem, and so on. How, then, do we use types? Mainly, 
I think, by manifesting them in tokens or, maybe, as a way to identify what 
sort of thing a given token is. None of this seems to be linguistic 
particularly, so it is unclear what it is doing in a discussion of language 
usage. Of course, when we report our using of types (or tokens, for that 
matter) we need words to refer to them. But that is also obviously talking 
about them and so not what you are after.

<<
Yes, you are _talking about_ the type. I'd like to
see some uses.
See above. I can't very well show you a use at this distance without 
describing it in language, but that is always going to be not what you want. 
So, go notice that a particular shovel is a shovel. There, what you just did 
was a use of a type. And it was linguistic how?

<<
>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}.
But, if lo'i du'u ... (the set, not the name of the set) has only one member, 
then a person who knows no Lojban can never be said to know or believe or... 
lo du'u ..., which seems odd at least. But even if the set has only one 
member, the type-token distinction still applies, since the token is always 
more concrete than the type and the member of the set is there because it 
manifests (not "is") the type. The cardinality of the set is irrelevant to 
token-type distinctions.

<<
>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.
Ahah! Now we are getting somewhere -- a formula for generating false 
sentences, but intelligible.
Everything in Lojban is on the same level grammatically, so {ta simsa le du'u 
ce'u sfofa} is perfectly clear and just false if {ta} refers to an article 
of furniture. It might be true if {ta} referred to, say, the property of 
being a settee. For the same reason, {ta simsa lo'e sfofa} is false (in your 
usage, where {lo'e sfofa} refers to the proximate type of sofas -- have I got 
that right, at least?) if {ta} refers to a piece of furniture, but could be 
true if {ta} referred to another type or maybe even a property. But all of 
this is still talking about the type. What is an example (by you) of using 
it?

<<
>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".
Again, can you give me a frinstance?
The contrast between use and mention is defined for linguistic entities and 
is fairly clear there (some hard cases and some still disputed, but generally 
in good shape). What it means (I take "talk about" to be the same as 
"mention") when applied to non-linguistic items like sets or types or senses 
or whatever is still not at all clear. My best guess is that, so far as 
language is concerned, there are no uses of types, etc., only mentions.