Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: containers

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:19:22 EDT

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.