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Oh, don't leave it, keep pushing. This is as near to coherent story about myopic singulars and the like as I can remember. I said that & and was getting political, but it seems to be really metaphysical. Logic tends to be very SAE and Aristotelian, characterless thing and properties. It seems that when & talks about purely formal grammar he means that we want to separate the grammar from any considerations of the underlying worldview ( all very anti-Whorfian). So, appealing to objects or even L-sets does carry any weight, since he wants a grammar will work as well, if the underlying worlds are composed of properties and realizations -- in a indefinite descending chain to infima species or if they consist of archetypes who perform all the acts that we attribute to individuals or ... and we could go on through a philosophy one textbook, or at least Cliff Notes on the possibilities, from atoms and the Void (or vibrating strings) to Shiva (or HaShem) a doer and viewer of all. I am not perfectly clear where that unique R comes in, but I think it has to do with some versions of the One Rabbit that does all the rabbitting. Sent from my iPad On Sep 11, 2012, at 5:38 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@hidden.email> wrote: > * Tuesday, 2012-09-11 at 11:15 +0100 - And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email>: > >> Martin Bays, On 11/09/2012 03:13: >>> I'd just like to briefly surface to say that I'd also be very interested >>> to see an account of this "andoxorxesian" l-. >>> >>> In an attempt to prompt one, here's the impression I've got from my >>> half-following of this thread: >>> you have la Ra Pa doing two things: >>> (a) creating a presupposition that the current situation >>> contains a unique individual satisfying R; >> >> Yes, where the individual is the only individual thatsatisfies R. >> >>> (b) binding a to that unique individual. >>> >>> Is that roughly right? >> >> Yes. And the important thing to grasp is that that's where the rules >> of the language end. The rules of the language don't tell you how to >> interpret sentences; they don't tell you what to do when you encounter >> "la Ra" yet you believe it is true that there are many R. I know how >> *I* as a user would interpret them, but that's different from the >> formal rules of the grammar. The formal rules of the grammar just give >> the presupposition and leave it at that. > > I'm not sure how to take this. How can I understand the presupposition > "exists unique a such that Ra" without knowing how to interpret Ra? > > Do you mean that you envision the rule as being a purely syntactic one, > which converts "la Ra Pa" to an expression in a new formal language > which (somewhere, I'm not sure where) includes an expression like > "E! a. Ra", and that although you have in mind some way to interpret this > new language (including interpreting this expression as > a presupposition), you don't want to discuss how to interpret the new > language? > > If that's right, could you explain the reasoning behind this position? > > In any case, I'm going to assume that what you actually have in mind is > something like the following: confronted with "la Ra Pa", the will > listener to try to guess the situation the speaker could be talking > about, based on context and the information that this situation contains > a unique individual a satisfying R, and then to interpret the speaker as > claiming the truth of Pa in this situation. But see below for why I'm > not really happy with this use of situations. > >> You are welcome to develop a dialect that does have rules specifying >> how to interpret sentences. >> >>> If so, how does (a) work exactly? What's the >>> scope of the presupposition, and what does "current situation" mean? Am >>> I right to bring in situations, which I mean in the sense of >>> http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/situations-semantics/, here? >> >> The current situation is the one the truth-conditions of the l- >> formula is evaluated against. I think distinguishing situations from >> UoD is a helpful move. > > Maybe. But in situational semantics (disclaimer: I don't actually know > anything about situational semantics), claims are still meant to be > evaluated against whole worlds. > > One could try to turn the presupposition into an actual claim about > subsituations: > w |= "la Ra Pa" iff > exists s<=w s.t. ( > s |= exists unique a. R(a) > /\ s |= exists a. (R(a) /\ P(a)) ) > > , but sadly this doesn't fit the rule > "na la Ra Pa <=> la Ra na Pa" > - just because there's a situation with a unique cat which isn't black > doesn't mean there's no situation with a unique cat which is black. > > I think it would help alot, actually, if you could clarify what you mean > by this rule. In what sense is that equivalence to be read? If we > interpret both sentences within the same situation, and that situation > satisfies the presupposition, then of course they get the same truth > value. Is that all that's meant? Or do you mean something stronger, that > when speaking I can substitute one for the other and expect to convey > the same information? I don't see how to get the latter. > >> Then we can say that the scope of the presupposition is the l- >> formula, which describes a situation, but that the 'referents' of >> l-bound variables enter the general UoD. For example, in one formula >> it might be presupposed that there is only one Martin, but in another >> it might be allowed that there are many, and the UoD is populated both >> by "the one-and-only Martin" and by sundry "one-of-many Martins". >> >>> Furthermore, it seems that the intention is that this construction >>> should work in concert with some ontological assumption that there are >>> things called "myopic singulars". Is it possible to communicate with you >>> in the language without understanding what those are? If, as I suspect, >>> not, could you explain what they are? >> >> A user could be of any of these three sorts: >> >> A. The user construes things as types that have subtypes, using l to >> point to the type, and s & r to quantify over subtypes. Every subtype >> has its own subtypes so there are uncountably infinitely many types. >> B. The user takes it that the world against which truthconditions are >> evaluated contains individuals and categories, these are different >> things, and it is clear which is which. The user uses l- to point to >> individuals and s- and r- to quantify over members of categories. >> C. The user takes it that the world against which truthconditions are >> evaluated contains individuals and categories, these are different >> things, but it is not clear which is which -- is an apparent >> individual in fact different similar-looking individuals? Are >> apparently different individuals in fact the same individual? This >> user would avoid referring to individuals, instead so as to be on the >> safe side always quantifying over members of (possibly singleton) >> categories with -s and r- and avoiding l-. > > I'll leave this here for now. I don't understand it yet, but I'm hoping > to after some of the issues above are cleared up. One thing which might > help, though: could you confirm my suspicion (based on vague > recollection of what you've said in the context of lojban) that in all > cases, you would have e.g. types of cats of various levels and > (in B and C) individual cats all satisfying mlt_? > >> I won't comment on the extent to which users of the different sorts >> can communicate with each other. I think it's not a linguistic issue, >> unless you were to give the language overt A- B- C- modes. > > OK. The dictionary entry of 'mlt', however, is a linguistic issue > (though not a grammatical issue). > >> Myopic singulars are where you merely assume that any apparently >> different instances of X are actually the same instance of X. > > I'll leave this too. > > Martin