From pycyn@aol.com Sun Jun 25 18:19:33 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 24229 invoked from network); 26 Jun 2000 01:19:30 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 26 Jun 2000 01:19:30 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-r09.mx.aol.com) (152.163.225.9) by mta3 with SMTP; 26 Jun 2000 01:19:30 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-r09.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v27.10.) id a.a9.76ab7b9 (4556) for ; Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:19:23 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:19:22 EDT Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: containers To: lojban@egroups.com MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: AOL 3.0 16-bit for Windows sub 41 From: pycyn@aol.com As I said in the interest of NOT getting involved in this, lb has no better solution than English (in fact it doesn't have as good a one right now, but I don't want to say that either). But we are snagged on the horns of a dilemma, one which happily occurs (as of right now -- but there are other cases lurking) only when we mention that the bottle contains nothing. By the rules {ta botpi no da} is equipollent to {ta na botpi da} and thus follows from {ta tanxe}, on the plausible assumption that no box is a bottle. We can save the case by saying that the the equipollence does not hold, that at best we have an implication, but then we have (as xorxes notes) the page being a passer even though there is no one that he passes. The latter is as clearly wrong (or more so) as that {ta botpi noda} entails {ta botpi} is right, but they have the same logical form (and even the same English form, if you want to emulate the lb situation more closely). English avoids the problem by not having inherent places (as xorxes notes) and by putting the information in subordinate forms ("containing" or "of" or...) which can be factored out in logical expansions (but the problem could probably be recreated easily in cases where English did not have this device). For now we are stuck with the reasonable appeal to common sense to sort the cases out -- not a good position for a logic, though a common one for langauges (Robin the Turk had a note from someone who said logic was incompatible with language and it is cases like this that give the person's claim some force -- until they are taken care of.) This is not giving up on predicate logic, it is just not knowing how to make use of it correctly at this point.