Subject: RE:su'u (verbose)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 8 Feb 2001 14:05:24 EST

The story so far (I apologize if I get positions misconnected to names): xod 
used NU sumti, Robin-the-Canuck reported that that was ungrammatical by 
jbofi'e, xod replied that it should be grammatical since it made sense.
Xorxes showed why it should not be grammatical - if it were then NU sumti 
brivla would be ambiguous, contrary to other well-established facts.  Cowan 
added that it didn't make sense either. pc and others insisted that it did 
make sense and attempted to spell out some of the senses, e.g., that  {kalo 
broda} would be just {broda} and {ka la Cmen} as near as possible to "is 
called 'Cmen'" and even suggested some ways to get the form by the parser 
(using the usually elidable closer {kei}).  pc complicated matters by noting 
that there are several things that NU sumti might mean; in particular, {ka} 
sumti might be either of at least two associates of something referred to by 
the sumti, the individual concept to the thing (vishesha, what picks that 
thing out in every world in which it exists - or picks out its counterpart in 
every world that has one - and so is not a property in any world) or the 
sense of the sumti [this is clearer than pc's original formulation, which 
was buried in logical trivia] (a set of properties associated with the sumti 
which allows one to pick out things to which the sumti might refer in each 
world). pc's point is that these are different but that both need expression 
in Lojban and neither has one at the economical level of mere NU sumti (not 
that the necessarily need expression so compactly, being rarely used).  The 
first of these critters is essential to the object it attaches to, make it be 
who it is; the second is incidental to the object, though perhaps essential 
to its being called what it is called - in other worlds, the same (or 
counterpart) object might be called something else and what  is called by 
this sumti might be a totally different object (or counterpart).  But we have 
to get to the essence through the object and to the object through some 
expression referring to it, whence the possible muddle.
Building on this, & gets into a related -- but only incidentally - issue 
about the relationship between names and things (which pc introduced in a bad 
analogy to deal with the above case).  Here the three items, thing, essence, 
and sense-of-sumti, come together in three theories: 1) names pick out things 
by convention only - even if you can infer with a high degree of certainty 
from a name something about the named , the connection is only social (like 
the relation between ordinary words and ordinary thing, considered 
extralinguistically) A name has NO sense.  2) A name refer to a thing by 
having the essence of the thing as its sense (designation,...) (and hence its 
referent -denotation - in intensional contexts, but I don't want to get into 
that) and so picks out its referent in the usual way by checking what fits 
the sense, but what is involved is a transcendental function, not this-world 
properties.  3) The sense of a name is that of a definite description, a 
complex property which presumably at most one thing in the worldsatisfies.  
1) is natural for Logical Positivists, 2) is needed for Fregeans, including 
Montagovians (and fits in nicely with Nyaya, except actually only for minima: 
atoms, souls and the like) and 3) makes sense of most actual uses of names of 
things not in intensional contexts and many that are and is required by 
Logical Atomists.  These relate to the original problem in the sense thatthe 
original can be seen as taking the [sumti]-ness as the sense of [sumti] and 
then the objects as being the two choices of what that sense is.  Or, it 
can be taken, as the choice between the sense of the sumti (essence) and the 
connotation (properties) of the sumti- in one sense of "connotation" (its 
also used for denotation and for designation - not always by different 
people).
Lobab's veridical notion comes in only in the sense that connotations (to get 
a shortname for them) have actually to fit if names are disguised 
descriptions, whereas, if names designate essences, the connotations may be 
merely useful guides without being perfect fits (just like {lo} and {le}).  
 
"chicken vaisheshika," which no Indian ever was, would be the usual thing 
except that the inhabitants of different worlds are distinct, so that what 
the essence picks out is not the same thing in each world, but merely a 
different thing which is the "counterpart" in that world.  This solves some 
messy onltological problems at the minor cost of having bloated body counts, 
and can almost solve all the problems that worlds with overlapping objects 
can almost solve too.
Bauddha is philosophical Buddhism (usually Mahayana except where really tight 
impermanence or compoundness  is the issue).