Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-") - engelang messages

On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:56 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:

Mike S., On 08/09/2012 01:11:
>
> The "everything true of some X is true of every X" is a conventional
> implicature, which in logical terms means it's outside the scope of
> any illocutionary.
>
> E.g. "ca li bcdi fghi" = "je jo si bcdi fghi ri bcdi fghica sibcdi
> fghi"
>
>
> Unfortunately, I don't believe that "jo si bcdi fghi ri bcdi fghi"
> stops encoding the useless meaning that I demonstrated that it
> encodes merely by shuffling it outside of some scope, that of an
> illocutionary or anything else.

But your demonstration requires precisely that the "jo" element not be presupposed.

You said, correctly, "It should follow that na li Ri Pi <=> li Ri na Pi", but then you made the improper move of replacing "li Ri Pi" by "jo si Ri Pi ri Ri Pi", which is valid only if the jo phrase is not presuppositional.

Have a misunderstood you?

It's not just that it fails to entail "na li Ri Pi <=> li Ri na Pi". That was just an experiment, a side issue. What I think I showed is that "jo si Ri Pi ri Ri Pi" equivalently means "jo si Ri na Pi ri Ri na Pi". How exactly does that weird meaning help anything?

Possibly the presupposition that you are looking for is "je si Ri Pi ri Ri Pi".

> It's pretty clear that "la mlta xkra" doesn't entail "ra mlta xkra",
> unless the universe of discourse is ham-handedly purged of non-black
> cats, and even in that case that entailment seems purely
> circumstantial.

"la mlta xkra" *does* entail "exactly one thing is mlta and ca ra mlta xkra". "That thing such that its sole defining characteristic is felinity is black" entails (no?) "everything feline is black". Just as "that thing such that its sole defining characteristic is Jorgehood is Argentinian" entails "everything that is Jorge is Argentinian".

Lucky, a cat that happens to have only one eye, is white, even while "la mlta xkra" seems pretty much true. If we're talking about Lucky, then he's going to be salient during the discussion even if we temporarily talk about cats in general. How does Lucky manage to appear in the universe of discourse when he's needed and disappear exactly when he's inconvenient? Furthermore:

le mlte je nlca'ake [but] si mlti na nlca'aki.

...obviously is intended to have both the myopic singularization of cats and individual cats in its universe of discourse. The sentence has a perfectly sensible and useful meaning. Presumably, you would interpret that sentence as a patent contradiction.

> I really dislike this pretense that the universe can vacillate so
> drastically with every new sentence added to the discourse,

But I think this bears more on the usage of lV than the meaning of lV. If a speaker says "la mlta xkra", it's clear what the *sentence* means, and it's up to the speaker to decide what sort of match the speakers wants between the proposition expressed by the sentence and the proposition the speaker is trying to communicate or the state of affairs the speaker is trying to describe.

If you're saying that "la mlta xkra" has more than one (specific) reading, then I agree. If you're saying that uttering that sentence has the effect of removing individual cats from the universe of discourse, then I must respectfully disagree.

> not only because that does violence to the very concept of a
> universe, but also because the underlying formalized meaning of "cat"
> itself depends on positing countless possible worlds full of cats,
> not just the handful of cats that might happen to comprise the
> current discourse topic. So constraining the model in this way not
> only feels rather arbitrary, but it wreaks enormous havoc on the
> underlying semantics as well.

I don't understand this (because the issues are ones I'm not accustomed to thinking about, not because you're opaque), but I also think the notion of an underlying formalized meaning of "cat" is extrinsic to core Xorban, tho it might play a part in some large loglang project based on Xorban lexicogrammar.

I am possibly being opaque. I am referring to an intensional logic which makes extensive use of possible world semantics. This is a key part of Montague's program and covered briefly in McCawley's ETLHAWTKAL which I believe you are familiar with. I simply can't do justice to something like Montague's intensional logic at this time, being a day or two behind on replies on this thread alone, not to mention scarcely following developments on other threads. Give me a rain check.

> I should note that ' Semantics of "l-" ' was less than ideal a
> choice for a thread title; I am mainly interested in how "l-" might
> be understood to work within FOL, at least for right now. Thanks to
> your ideas and Jorge's, I am fairly confident that "lV RV" can be
> defined as "sV [[R]]V" and equivalently "rV [[R]]V" and get that job
> done with relative ease. I think we have a good impression of
> what's inside the black box [[R]]; if not, a fully satisfying
> explanation can wait until another day.

I'm glad you think there's consensus. I haven't yet got my head around "[[R]]" -- you'd said it's not an intension, right? -- but very possibly your [[mlt]] is my "that whose sole defining property is felinity".