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

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 17:04:39 EDT

to aulun

Lord, how old are you (not really prying)? I'm mid-sixty and my *teachers* 
had Mengenlehre (often from text that called it that, to be sure) in their 
undergraduate courses.

<. So maybe I understand your point now:
1) (Speaking of humans) "all pregnants are females (women)" (the set of 
pregnants is contained in the set of females)
2) "only females are pregnant" (the set of females is partly included in the 
set of pregnants whose members are all females)>

The point is that 1 and 2 are exactly the same: the set of pregnants is a 
subset of the set of females (possibly an empty subset). 

<This doesn't entail that there is any woman pregnant nor that there actually 
is any woman or any pregnant at all.>
Bingo! (That is exactly correct).

<Shouldn't we put it as: "*if* there are any pregnants, they are women">
That is a third way of saying exactly the same thing.

<Yet, I still think that your Carmel example is misleading, because you're 
giving specific information on those women (being 
inhabitants of that named convent), thus somehow pretending you're talking of 
*real existing* women living there and being 
pregnant.>
Guilty to the following extent. Bringing in all those details, which have 
nothing to do -- apparently -- with the case, leads to a set of expectations 
that they are going to turn up in the rest of the story somehow. That*is* 
the implicature that leads one to want to say that at least one of those nuns 
is pregnant and even that at least one of the monks is in the other case. 
The point, however, is that it is the details, not the logical situation that 
gets us there -- the pregnant nun is not entailed by the claim.