Subject: [lojban] Re: Three more issues

From: And Rosta <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 25 Apr 2001 17:38:08 +0100

Adam Raizen:
#To take another example, say a meat-eater says "loi rectu cu kukte". m
#does not want to claim that every piece of meat is tasty, However, it
#would defeat the point of the statement to limit the claim to some
#mass of meat that m has in mind. I think that "loi" expresses this
#situation well, without any changes to the definition in the book.

This is not really about masses but the criteria for kuktehood.
The same issue you describe would arise with "le pa rectu cu
kukte", which would not be appropriate if only one small portion
of le pa rectu was kukte.

This goes for all the other examples discussed, such as living
in Africa and weighing 95 kilos. That is, masses behave the
same as single individuals, so it makes sense to say "I am
sunburnt", even when only part of me is sunburnt, while it
does not make sense to say "I weigh 2 kilos", even though, say,
my foot weighs 2 kilos. Similarly, it does not make sense to
say "I am a finger", even though part of me is a finger.

To repeat, then, masses behave like individuals, and logical
debates about the properties of masses are an instance of
a more general debate about the properties of individuals.

--And.