Subject: Re: [lojban] etc. = mass, apparently

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Mar 2000 17:33:01 -0500

At 10:49 AM 03/02/2000 -0500, [email-masked] wrote:
>Okay, I take it back. Lojban still has one of the confusions that went into
>Loglan's lo left in its understanding (maybe two, given asome remarks here).
>The confusion is between the joint-action mass and the mass-noun mass (and
>maybe the manifestable mass, Quine's gavagai, and the goo mass).
>I have taken it, on the basis of usage, past debates, and common sense that
>the Lojban mass sumti were the first of these, their properties the additive
>of the members of the set "massified."
>The second treats a mass like the referent of English mass nouns, as having
>no natural individuations (members) but capable of indefintely many different
>divisions into units -- as water can be ladled out in cups. spoons, etc. But
>each of these units has to have the characteristics of the mass -- a teaspoon
>of water is still water -- so that this deindivualization does not work when
>what is massified is something inherently individualized

I think these two can be resolved as one, when we say that the referent is 
the "linguistically relevant" properties of the mass. The mass in the 
first set does not have the sum of ALL properties of the individuals. I am 
not sure that the weight of a joint-action mass is well-defined but it 
seems not limited to either the values for the individuals nor to the sum 
of their weights. In the second, it is not clear whether a single molecule 
of water is a viable unit of the mass of water (it is missing many of the 
properties we associate with water, but will for example enter into a 
chemical reaction as does the mass of water - so in chemistry it is and in 
rainfall it is not a unit of the mass), and cups, spoons etc. are 
ill-defined in absolute terms since water molecules are constantly 
evaporating and condensing into the unit.

>: the mass of Bob and
>John can only be cut up into a Bob and a John, not a Bohn and a Job, and keep
>the character of the mass.

That depends. The mass of Bob and John has 4 arms. If you cut them up, 
that property changes. If you up biological parents into the two 
individuals, the linguistically relevant mass property does not obtain:

(le verba cu panzi la djim joi la meris.)

>The manifestation mass does allow some extention of that, in that a
>manifestation of gavagai may be (apparently, Quine nor JCB is clear on this)
>a rabbit part (still identifiable as such, I think) as well as a whole rabbit
> -- certainly the hypothetical Trobriander is entitled to say "gavagai' on
>seeing an ear or a tail or a foot and it is not clear that he is going beyond
>his data in this. Whether a (cut off) ear and a (ditto) foot constitute one
>piecee gavagai or two (or whether the fact that they come from one rabbit or
>two makes a difference) is unclear, but it does seem to be required that what
>we have is recognizably rabbitty.

in the current linguistically relevant sense.

>The goo version drops this latter requirement and would have any quantity of
>the goo that results from putting the set behind a mass into a blender and
>running at liquify for five minutes as being a representative part of the
>mass, even though it no longer has any of the identifying properties.

I'm not sure I want this mass (mess? %^)

lojbab
----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)