Subject: Re: loi (was Re: [lojban] Rosetta Project Genesis translation)

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 25 May 2001 12:04:13 EDT

In a message dated 5/25/2001 2:44:49 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> <In Quine's set theory and in many others, sets are commonly defined 
> so that ( x | f(x) ) is the set of all x having the property f, where 
> f is subject to certain syntactic restrictions. I find it much easier 
> to deal with such sets using lo'i for many purposes than with the 
> much fuzzier notions you get into below.
> 
How did this word get into Lojban in the first place? I understand 
lo'i (the set of individuals that...) but who thought of "mass of 
individuals" and what did *he* think he meant by it?>

Not Quinine set theory but the Quine of underdeterminate theories and 
indeterminate translations is on of the sources of JCB's mass. (Though he 
was a social psychologist, he was of the generation that got disastrous doses 
of logical positivism and actually tried to apply it, so I assume he read 
Quine first, then picked up Malinoswski and the Trobrianders later.) So part 
of the ancestor of {loi} is "gavagai" and Mr. Rabbit.
A second part is mass nouns in English -- though without the "piece of" idiom.
A third part is the disambiguation of sentences like "Chicagoans drink more 
beer tha New Yorkers"
These three lie behind the three metaphors I tried for {loi}. Each is 
incomplete and misleading in various ways (theology again), but they all try 
to make the behavior of {loi broda} vis a vis the individual broda plausible.
The Platonic ideal nor the Neo-Platonic/Gnostic/Hermetic myth don't work so 
well, for it is (on this story) really Mr. Rabbit totally that does what each 
rabbit does, not some pale copy and not some piece embedded in the prison of 
flesh -- and not even a good Hindu maya, for the individual and the mass 
individual are equally totally real.

The problem with using {lo'i} is that sets have a very limited range of 
activities -- they can't carry pianos, for example, nor drink beer. About 
all they can do is have members, include or overlap or be included in other 
sets, and have cardinalities. Not very useful, as xorxes keeps pointing out. 
We no doubt could develop some idioms involving sets, but none have achieved 
much currency -- and masses do seem to cover the most tempting cases.

<o "teams" that are not sets but have members, like...what?>

Well, teams. Teams(and all the other things) are sets, of course, but it is 
not there setness that is of interest, rather it is some other relation among 
the members of the set that we want.

<Each of these supposedly grammatical theories is in fact an ontology. 
Since we can't very well agree on the correct ontology on behalf of 
the rest of humanity, it would be better if we had a way to specify 
an ontology explicitly when we needed it. That is however a can of 
worms that I am happy not to have to deal with the reality of.>

Well, they could be ontologies (and so could every grammar, of course) but 
here they are meant simply as metaphors, theories in mythic form if you will 
(more theology).
<Please note that in Buddhist ontology some things are said not to 
fall in any of the categories

Existence
Non-existence
Both existence and non-existence
Neither existence nor non-existence>
Well, strictly, not that some things fail to be in any of these categories, 
but that for some things (alreay an error, probably) the Buddha refused to 
say that they belonged to any of these categories (the Jains would go three 
categories more, but the ruined it by saying that everything did fall into 
one of those -- "maybe"). Buddha said {na'i} (cf. the Athanasian creed "We 
may not say that...").

<>Reminders of these would be very welcome.

Well, let's see...How about>

I was looking for other metaphors that have been used for {loi} , especially 
those that & produced some time ago and that I can't faind at the moment. 
Your suggestions get us off into ontology, and that is another day's work.

One more metaphor: the mass of individuals sums up the properties of the 
individuals: literally in the case of weight (or beer drinking), logically in 
a lot of cases (inhabiting Africa, for example) and in some undefined -- 
though intuitively obvious -- sense in many other cases (the performance of 
the team is the "sum" of the actions of the various team members, a mob does 
the sum of the actions of its members, etc.)