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Martin Bays, On 11/09/2012 23:38:
* Tuesday, 2012-09-11 at 11:15 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>:
The discussion has moved on a bit, and I don't want to go muddying any waters that have become clearer, but since this is addressed to me I should reply.
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?
You do have access to the encyclopedia entry for R
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?
I do think presuppositionality is represented in logical form, which falls within the scope of the formal specification of the language. I don't know what "E!" is. I am open to discussing how I as a user would interpret stuff. I just want to maintain -- and have my interlocutors maintain -- a clear conceptual distinction between that and the formal specification of the language.
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.
I think that's what would happen, yes. But if some user came along and said "Hey, you're uttering all these sentences with presuppositions that are in fact false, so the sentences have no truth value, and although I could try to guess your intended meaning based on how the logical form or the lexical meanings would have to be adapted in order to make the presupposition true, I really don't want to bother, because the reason I'm using this language in the first place is to reduce the proportion of the communicative burden that rests upon pragmatic interpretation", I would be sympathetic to that user and adapt my usage accordingly.
the rule "na la Ra Pa<=> la Ra na Pa" 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?
Yes.
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.
I'm conscious I'm being slow on the uptake. I don't see how they'd convey different information. I'm considering the following, which don't simply allow both the surface syntactic forms "na la Ra Pa" and "la Ra na Pa" to correspond the same logical form "la Ra ca Pa" ("ca" is illocutionary operator):
ra prna li mmtika na xbnaki
ra prna na li mmtika xbnaki
(xbn = hate)
... but I stilldon't see a difference.
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_?
In Type-A ontology, there aren't levels, only types, and types satisfy mlt_. In Types B & C, I'd have thought that only individuals and not categories satisfy mlt_, but I'm open to being corrected on that -- if you tell me that in Type-B/C ontology, various ways of generalizing over cats are themselves cats, even tho they're not individual cats, I will listen with interest and (perhaps bemused) credence.
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).
The dictionary entry of mlt contains a pointer to the encyclopedia entry but doesn't itself tell you anything about cats or anything more about what mlt means. The formal specification of the language is silent on the contents of the encyclopedia entries. I hope it's clear by now that when I say this stuff, I am talking about one version of a loglang, and in no way wish to deny folk wanting a different version from having what they want. John Cl wants that in his version of Xorban, the morpheme l is assigned to a widest-scope existential quantifier: and that's fine. --And.