Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: importing ro

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 7 Nov 2002 09:22:21 EST

In a message dated 11/6/2002 9:27:59 PM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:
<<
> that if we want {naku ro broda cu brode} to be
> equivalent to {su'o broda naku brode}, we have to define
> {ro broda cu brode} as {ro da ganai broda gi brode}. If we
> don't define it like that, then the negation passage won't
> always work.
>>
But why would we want that equivalence. It is a product of the same mistake 
that makes "Every S is P" into the universally quantified conditional. We 
have two ways to treat a universal in Logic. Lojban offers both and in the 
same format as they are offered in Logic. Further the two ways in Lojban are 
related exactly as they are in Logic. This seems to be the kind of result we 
would want. If you really want a short way to say non-importing {ro}, then 
use the device you devised (? {ni'u ro}?) and all will come out as you want.

<<
[&] . It may be irrelevant to 99.9% of usage as a
>whole, but is it irrelevant to 99.9% of usage of ro? I
>don't think so -- necessarily-nonimporting "every" is very
>common in English (at least in the varieties I'm exposed to
>in quotidian and professional life); pc's experience differs).

You may be right. It would be interesting to see the results
if someone actually took the trouble of going through some
corpus to measure the relative frequencies.
I'm not sure just how this survey would work. Surely most cases are ones in 
which the subject term is non-null, so you cannot tell which kind of 
quantifier is used. I suspect that the number cases of using a null-subject 
universal when you know the subject is null is vanishing small outside of 
indirect proofs in mathematics and logic. Using a universal with a subject 
which turns out to be null is not uncommon, but claiming that you meant a 
non-importing quantifier seems just a way of avoiding being convicted of 
saying something false. I think there is a footnote in Vendler about some 
actual corpus checks, with essentially this outcome.