From jjllambias@hotmail.com Thu May 25 10:32:49 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 12934 invoked from network); 25 May 2000 17:32:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 25 May 2000 17:32:27 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO qg.egroups.com) (10.1.2.27) by mta1 with SMTP; 25 May 2000 17:32:25 -0000 Received: (qmail 25309 invoked from network); 25 May 2000 17:32:25 -0000 Received: from n14.onelist.org (HELO jk.egroups.com) (10.1.10.92) by iqg.egroups.com with SMTP; 25 May 2000 17:32:25 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: jjllambias@hotmail.com Received: from [10.1.10.32] by jk.egroups.com with NNFMP; 25 May 2000 17:32:25 -0000 Date: Thu, 25 May 2000 17:32:15 -0000 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: le ga'irfanta Message-ID: <8gjo2v+ng24@eGroups.com> In-Reply-To: User-Agent: eGroups-EW/0.82 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Length: 4403 X-Mailer: eGroups Message Poster From: "Jorge Llambias" la pycyn cusku di'e > O Drat! Is it time for the semiannual go'round about the relation between > the properties of masses and the properties of the members of the underlying > classes? I haven't written the last one up yet! > Well, I won't start it. I find your argument convincing until I try to > formulate the general principle and then it does not seem to work. So, I'll > stick with "le or piro lei would have been safer." I think it may be worth trying to separate two things in the discussion. One is the question of how masses interact logically with the other sumti in a given bridi, this has to do with the quantifiers, and a different question is how the properties of the mass relate to the properties of the underlying components. As to the first question, the beauty of masses is that they are single referents. {lei so'i broda} refers to a plurality, but as a single referent. This is a very nice thing, because single referents are the easiest to deal with in terms of scopes of quantifiers and such. Just like {le pa broda} and names, {[piro] lei broda} can be moved around past quantified variables and the meaning doesn't change. You don't have to worry about order of quantifiers because they essentially behave as constants. Thus: la djan e lo drata ba'o tcidu [piro] lei cukta John and someone else have read the books. makes the same claim as: [piro] lei cukta ba'o se tcidu la djan e lo drata The books have been read by John and someone else. The order of the arguments doesn't affect anything. But if we change {piro} to {pisu'o}, the two claims become different. In the first case we would claim that John and someone else each read some fraction of the books, not necessarily the same fraction each. In the second case, we would be saying that there is some fraction that they both read. {pisu'o lei cukta} does not have a singular referent, it is an existential, like {lo cukta} that refers to at least one of all the possible fractions of {piro lei cukta}, and the order in which it shows up matters. I think this is a very strong reason for why the implicit quantifier of {lei} has to be {piro}. The simplest posiible reference is to a singular referent, we can't throw that away and make {lei broda} a rather more complicated reference by giving it an existential quantifier. A different question to deal with is the relation between the properties of a mass and the properties of the underlying components. I think the formula that the properties of the mass are some kind of sum of the properties of the components works in general, but I'm not sure it does so always. In some cases it is clearly the arithmetic sum: the weight of a mass of books is the sum of the weights of the component books. In other cases it is more like a logical sum: let's say a playing card covers one percent of the surface of a table. Then a deck of 40 cards may cover from one to forty percent of that surface, depending on how the cards are arranged on the table. It is a kind of sum, but the overlapping parts only count once. So sometimes the whole is less than the sum of the parts. But there are cases where the whole is more than the sum of the parts, when there are group synergies, or emergent properties, and in those cases it may be hard to see the properties of the mass as a sum of properties of the components. Suppose I see a flock of birds flying by and I say {lei cipni cu melbi}. I don't really know if each or any of the birds is beautiful, I can't really see them to tell, but I do like the patterns and movements of the flock. That is an emergent property that I can't really think of as a sum of properties of each bird. So although I think that the relation between the mass and the component properties is an interesting thing to consider, I don't think we can give an absolutely general rule, there may be classes of properties that behave one way or another, but I doubt there is a rule that applies equally to all properties. And we don't really need any such rule, because when we understand the meaning of a predicate, say P(x1,x2,x3), we understand it as a relationship between three singular entities. Some of those singular entities may be pluralities, but the relationship applies to the three singular objects, not to the components that may make up any of the three objects. co'o mi'e xorxes