Subject: As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers]

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sun, 25 Jun 2000 21:51:39 EDT

Well, he actually said that a white horse is not a horse, but "An empty 
bottle is not a bottle" does not seem a great improvement. It does solve 
some of the problems, of course, but not all (the implication from {ta tanxe} 
still works, for example) and it has the peculiar result that we need to know 
the history and content of an object to know what it is -- though not what it 
might be. This seems backward from what we would normally do or say or 
experience: we see and say that something is a bottle or a nest or whatever, 
long before we can see what is in it or even when we never do find out. Now, 
I suppose the point is that {botpi} doesn't mean "bottle" but something else 
that amounts to "bottle" in most situations, but in those (often 
unidentifiable) situations it only means "could-be bottle". However, lb 
wisely gave up that basic "could-be" reading explicitly in revising Loglan 
(at about the same time it less wisely gave up basic comparative reading on 
adjectives -- but that is another story). To bring it back now to solve a 
small part of a minor problem seems ill-advised, not to mention a bretrayal 
of the grounds of the earlier decision. I think some other approach is 
called for to solve this dilemma, even if this one would work for the whole 
thing.