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lo, the vanishing wtf



I assume that the quantifier l in Xorban started as the quantifier version of lo, a word with a long and tumultuous history in both Loglan and Lojban.  That history has been characterized by a paucity of clear statements, a variety of conflicting formulations (both each with itself and each with each other) and a lack any final agreement and official statement.  The xorlo doctrine relied, for the most part, on ignoring what was going on and just sticking with the expressions.  It worked a good 90% of the time, since  the various ideas about what was going on generally agreed in concrete cases.  Now we are starting again (well, are already, in a month and a half, several decades into it) and the goal is get it right from as close to the start as possible and to build on something other than the potentially shifting sands of past controversy.

You know my view.  It has the virtue of being about as close to a minimal extension of the cases that seem to work for every view as is possible,  It easily embraces the massification view, if you leave out the guts on the windshield bit (which takes another step).  Its contact with the myopic particulars and xorxes' (apparently) related view are harder to discern, since these seem to go deeper into metaphysics than the first two, which are (ultimately) purely syntactic (or can be treated as such).

One of the problems that seems to infect the last two views is that they seem to want to bring the extraneous matter of intensionality into the discussion.  Intensionality has to do with with alternate possible worlds.  Quantifiers, like l, have to do with this world -- or, rather, with the world current at the moment the quantifier is brought into play; there are no intensional quantifiers. 

Along the same line, it in no wise clarifies matters to introduce into the language worlds, variables and predicates on worlds and the like, since that just makes everything extensional.  The present world then contains all these other worlds and all the things in them and all the predicates relative to them and so on and intensionality disappears into really complex (and unrealistic) facts about the worlds in this world.  Metalanguages have their uses, but mainly only so long as the stay meta.  When they become object language, they cease to be meaningful or useful.

So, how is it that cats are black, even though not all of them are and not just one is either?  If we know the answer to that, maybe we can consider how I saw a picture of a green and white polkadotted cat.