Subject: [lojban] Re: Any (was: Nick will be with you shortly)

From: Steven Belknap <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2003 10:25:00 -0600

On Friday, February 28, 2003, at 09:17 AM, John Cowan wrote:

> Martin Bays scripsit:
>
>> Oh dear. If I've understood your meaning of "any" correctly - you 
>> need a
>> doctor, and what's more you need a doctor precisely because of its
>> doctorishness, and don't care about specific identity or other 
>> properties
>> - then this is precisely the kind of circumstance in which I'd use 
>> lo'e.
>> I need "the typical" doctor - I need "the result of squinting over 
>> the set
>> of all things which doctor".
>>
>> I'm guessing that's wrong. Anyone feel like explaining why?
>
> Because "lo'e mikce" is an abstraction bearing only the typical 
> features of
> doctors. As Woldy says, the typical lion is neither male nor female, 
> though
> all actual lions are one or the other. If you want lo'e mikce, you 
> will not
> get much doctoring from it.

The typical lion's sex is unspecified, but is either male or female. If 
a pride of lions climbs in to my Ford Windstar, I can separately 
consider each lion as it enters and classify each lion as being typical 
or atypical. A lion which can not be easily classified as male or 
female would be an atypical lion. So Woldy's "typical" lion would be 
classified as atypical.

One might also consider the extent to which each lion in the pride is 
typical, comparing each to the one-in-mind typical lion. My one-in-mind 
lion happens to be male, so a female lion would be less typical than a 
male lion, all other traits being equal.

-Steven