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

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 12:17 AM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote: 

Whoa!  Who belongs to the 'lo = su'o' camp?  No one I know of off hand, and certainly not me (I explicitly say s does not imply l).  

I apologize if I misrepresented your position.  I think there used to be a "conservative" faction that wanted to preserve the CLL implicit quantifiers "[su'o] lo [ro]" effectively = "su'o" and get the other meanings by other mechanisms.  In my faulty memory, I thought you were one of them or similar.

 
I also have done rather more serious work than most with actual possible world semantics (rather than the casual drop ins that turn up often in the discussions back on Lojban).  But I think that an awful lot of language is extensional and ought to be treated as such, bringing in the intensional only as needed.  
That there are uses of "bears", for example, that require intensional treatment is obvious; that they don't all is equally obvious and trying to ram them all together in one ambitensional form is the road to logical disaster.  

Why do you want to make a fussy distinction in the syntax that is already covered by the meaning of the predications?  If by definition "vska'ake" chooses an "extensional" reading of "le strcpe" and if by definition "dsgna'ake" chooses an "intensional" reading of "le strcpe", what value does it add to duplicate that difference in syntax?  Often, it makes things needlessly complicated - take "le strcpe je ma djna dsgnake vska'ake", which would require paraphrasing. 

 
BTW, FOPL is strictly extensional and Xorban and Lojban, insofar as they are intensional, are a totally different breed.  The most accurate description of what we are after, I suspect, is a speakable version of Montague's intensional language (never mind that Richard would say that English already was one).

I have been plugging Montague since the start of Xorban, and I think that's what Xorban is tending towards, or at least will incorporate in some way.