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Mike S., On 09/09/2012 05:32:
On Fri, Sep 7, 2012 at 9:56 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email <mailto: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".
I think the presupposition I'm looking for is, given "li bcdi", "ru smu jo si bcdi ckjiku ri bcdi ckjiku". But I'm not adamant on the point.
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?
If "la mlta xkra" seems pretty much true then the universe of discourse must have adapted appropriately. If you can't get the universe of discourse to adapt, then "la mlta xkra" isn't going to seem true.
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.
No, I'd interpret that as a shift in UoD.
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.
I'm not sure I see the difference in practice. Given that "la mlta xkra" presupposes there's exactly one mlt, the interpretation must fiddle with the UoD and/or the definition of mlt so as to conform with the presupposition.--And.