Subject: RE: not only

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 16:36:42 EDT

In a message dated 4/19/2001 12:11:01 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> 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?
> 

About as good a statement of how an implicature (not an implcation, by the 
way) works as is likely to come along.   I am committed, as a cooperating 
interlocutor, to saying all and only what is relevant and known.  If, in a 
discussion of olive liking (wherer do these unlikely examples come from?) I 
say "In my family only my wife likes olives" and leave it at that, then 
either she likes olives or I have failed to be a cooperative interlocutor, 
since I could have said "No one in my family likes olives" if even my wife 
does not.  But being a cooperative interlocutor does not mean one has to be a 
boring one or even a very nice one, so I can fulfill my task by adding --asI 
am wont to do, alas -- "and even she doesn't like them".  My duty is doneand 
I have given everybody a little jolt, compensating for the fact that no one 
shakes my hand anymore after the unfortunate miswired joybuzzer incident 
(fictitious).  I am not as mean in this as the imagined house-namer, though 
even he is within his rights, but setting up for a hell of a {ta'u ma}  (I 
knew a couple who had a pure white dog named Spot -- because he was a pure 
white spot on any scene he entered).  
As for putting in a {zo'o}, if they can't get a joke, fuck3'em.
Of course, now that we have established what triggers these kinds of 
implicatures (and it does not actually have to be designated individuals), we 
have the warning already in place: Lojban needs to do no more that English, 
etc. does -- avoid practical jokers and logicians.
On the other hand, if you really want to make something of it all, you have 
{po'o} which is a floating disaster at the moment.  If you use it only as 
though it were a quantifier (since it is UI, it can occur anywhere and so can 
occur anyhwere PA can -- though in the middle of string of digits is a little 
odd) or to write some rules for it to assure that every use of it could be 
changed into a quantifier form, then you would have an "only" that carried 
the exemplification condition that you feel is needed.  I rather like that 
idea actually, since it allows me to get my universal with existential import 
in (the existential import of universals may, in fact, be only an 
implicature, too, but it got embedded in logic at the beginning and has been 
hard to shake -- and it distinguishes two class of universals in English, so 
it has some practical values as well).