Subject: Re: [lojban] RE: "not only"

From: Robin Lee Powell <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 10:10:28 -0700

On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 11:38:19AM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> We now have a very peculiar situation. 
> I take it that everyone agrees that for the general case "Only S is P" means 
> "All P is S" and thus does not entail "Some S is P" or even "Something is P". 
> If there is some doubt about this, consider the following. For humans it is 
> universally true that only females are pregnant. So, in particular, it is 
> true that only female inhabitants of the Carmel of Sts Tereesa and Therese 
> are pregnant. But, even though there are female (and only female) 
> inhabitants, it does not follow that any of them are pregnant.
> Similarly, only female inhabitants of Gethsemani Abbey are pregnant. It does 
> not follow from this that any of these men is pregnant, indeed, from the fact 
> that they are all men it follows that none of them is pregnant. Of course, 
> you could say that it is not true of these groups that only female members 
> are pregnant, but that entails that they are not human, contrary to all the 
> available evidence.

<nod> With you so far.

> However, when the S class gets small enough or specific enough or is 
> mentioned in a certain way (I am unclear just what the condition is here), 
> this rule no longer holds:
> "only s is P" means something else. I am not perfectly sure what, but it 
> seems to be at least "s is P and nothing different from s is P" which simply 
> adds the questioned conclusion to the general solution (the second half is 
> equivalent to "All P is s"), thus guaranteeing that it does indeed follow. 

There's an obvious change of category here, though.

If I say "Only my wife likes olives", I'm talking about a single named
class of individuals. If I say, "Of the inhabitants of the Carmel of
Sts Tereesa and Therese, only Vivian is pregnant", I am, again, talking
about a named class of individuals. In both those cases, there is an
_extremely_ strong implication that the named class does, in fact,
conform to the condition. I will, however, agree with you that it is an
implication, not an entailment.

However, I would certainly add something clarifying such entailment to a
lojbanic version, because if the member of the named class does not
conform to the condition, this seems to me to be equivalent to referring
to a black-painted house as le blabi zdani because once you saw a cat
that lives there chasing a white dog. Unless your listener has that
context, or the sentence has a zo'o or je'unai in it, this is
obstructionist and obnoxious behaviour that results in no communication.
Why the _hell_ are you mentioning that only your wife likes olives if
she does not, in fact, like olives?

-Robin

-- 
http://www.digitalkingdom.org/~rlpowell/ BTW, I'm male, honest.
le datni cu djica le nu zifre .iku'i .oi le so'e datni cu to'e te pilno
je xlali -- RLP http://www.lojban.org/