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

Do read some of my stuff sometime. I am not the one making fussy syntactic distinction. I have almost only insisted that items be put in their proper places relative to scope operators, world changers in particular. Now Lojban is set up so that, regardless of what the semantics of a predicate is, all argument places are extensional. Therefore, to get intensional contexts we have to use overtly intensional arguments (typically abstractions of some sort). Quantifiers in those contexts need to be marked as being in those contexts, somehow. This, if someone looks like a bear, the reference to a bear must be marked as being in an intensional contexts (unless, of course, there is a ear he looks like, which is, alas, also a possible reading of the English). I am not suggesting a separate quantifier for this, just a careful placement -- which Xorban does not account for and which your examples show clearly not applied. Which bear does he look like? Which spaceship did he design? Of course, all these predicates can equally well have extensional arguments: there may be a bear he looks like (I have a friend who resemble Yogi rather remarkably) and, in a different context, saying a person designed a starship can be perfectly well answered with the Enterprise (not, alas, available in the present context). So, you can't solve the problem by relying on the meaning of the predicates nor by having a quantifier that swings wither way (since you can't tell which way it is swinging). You could do it by have two sets of quantifiers, but that would miss the logical form. The way is to have careful scoping rules and a clear way to show them in force. Tentatively, I was looking at putting the quantifiers after the predicate when intensional for that predicate, but there are messy details that don't work out well yet.

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 9, 2012 6:43 PM
Subject: 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.