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Martin Bays, On 18/09/2012 02:37:
* Monday, 2012-09-17 at 01:22 +0100 - And Rosta<and.rosta@hidden.email>:I think the options for the extension are: 1a one feline thing, which looks like a single cat 1b one feline thing, which looks like a bunch of cats 2a many separate feline things, which look like single cats 2b many separate feline things, which look like bunches of cats l- gives 1a/1b; r-/s- give 2a/2b.What do you mean by "the extension"? The extension of mlt_ in the UoD?
Yes.
So you're going back to having the UoD somehow contort to adapt to the choice of quantifier? If so, how does that work? If not, then what?
The four options I listed are what you get by applying different criteria for individuation and separating one individual from another. Either that's four ways of construing the same UoD (which is my take on things) or there's a four-way choice of UoDs, or...
So will all the intermediate massifications. So e.g. the weights of the things you're singularising varies from a hundred grams or so for a kitten to billions of kg if you take the entirety of current catdom. So why would you have it weighing on the order of a kilogram? (Of course I don't expect you to be able to give precise rules for answering questions like "[what is the weight of] la mlta"! I'm looking only for general ideas.)If all cats are in fact the same cat, its weight fluctuating a bit between one appearance and another, its typical weight is a few kilograms. Or you could state its weight as the range within which it fluctuates.I suppose the answer must be along the following lines: the myopic singularisation is itself performed with respect to a choice of individuating criterion. In this case, you happened to pick the one which looks at individual cats. But you reserve the right to instead e.g. singularise species (in which case you would presumably decline to answer a silly question like "what's its weight?").Is it silly? "Homo Sapiens stands up to 2.5 metres tall."Perhaps, but I meant something more like "the myopic singularisation of the species Panthera tigris, Puma concolor and Felus catus weighs ?? kg" (where species is meant in the kind of sense you've suggested, whereby a cat species itself satisfies mlt_).
It doesn't seem silly to me. The weight would be some kind of range, I guess.
So now I'm imagining something along the lines of taking the mereological sum, but then dividing up that sum into "individuals" according to some criterion, and assigning the m.s. those properties which hold "generically" of those pieces... but perhaps this is wildly inaccurate?It's not sufficient. For example, you wrote the email I'm responding to, but if I divided you up into individuals by some criterion that makes you many individuals, I wouldn't expect that the property of having written the email holds generically of the individuals. Yet still, you did write the email.And that's really because the myopic singularisation of those individuals did? Not a massification, say?
I can't think of clear differences between those two -- I can't think of analogues of "Weighs X amount" and "has X heads". But I haven't given it much thought.
(In case it wasn't clear, by the way, I bandy these terms about as if I know what you mean by them not because I do, but in the hopes of eliciting responses which might lead me to.)Then there's the complementary question: if these myopic singularisations satisfy mlt_, then (one would naively expect) they'll end up in massifications. How does that work, or is it just disallowed?If you mean they'll end up in a massification of mlt, it's not one of the options.OK. So why not? What can go in such a massification?
The extension. The four options I listed are mutually exclusive. The four options are four alternative extensions. They don't coexist within the one extension. --And.