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

Well, I admit I don't follow much of this. The universe of discourse may change during a discourse as it is revealed that certain sorts of things are in it that were not obviously so at the beginning. But there is nothing in that that compels the size of the new class brought in to be a unit class or any other size (unless, perhaps, what is introduced is "there is exactly one ..." -- and even that can be false, after all, in many cases). I am also have a problem reading la mlta alone, since I take mlt in this structure to be a restriction and thus requiring a furthr predicate to make a meaningful sentence. It does appear that, in spite of being clear about wanting only syntactic rules, you seem to want pragmatic ones to come it, somehow getting a presupposition or an implicature from the occurrence of la mlta xekra to the state of affairs in which mlt refers to a unit class. How, exactly, does that work? I suppose, if I say seriously enough that some cat is black, therefore every cat is black, I convey that there is exactly one cat (at least to a logically minded person). But, of course, crucially, I see no reason to think that using la mlta xkra presupposes jo re mlte xkre si mlti xkri. Even if la mlta xkra means "There is exactly one cat and it is black", it doesn't presuppose this -- and there is not reason to think it means anything like that.
Puzzle "given "li bcdi" (I assume you mean that given someone utters "li bcdi fghi") then "ru smu jo si bcdi ckjiku ro bcdo ckjoku" (holds, I suppose). Since I am not quite clear what "sm" and "ckj" mean I can only guess that this means something like "for every property, if some bcd has that property just in case every bcd has that property" And thus, of course, that ra bcda fgh and se bcde fghe are both true or both false (and so presumably true, since minimally the li bcd i fgh i, implies se bcde fghe). But where does the jump come from?
I'm sorry, but adapting the universe of discourse to make weird things true that weren't before smells much more like politics than logic. It is not a standard move in any case.

From: And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>
To: engelang@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, September 10, 2012 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: [engelang] Xorban: Semantics of "l-" (and "s-" and "r-")

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.