I'm just recording a few preliminary thoughts to be pursued at a later time...
On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 10:33 PM, John E Clifford
<kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
la fgra le glre dksake.
versus
la fgra le li glri kmeki dksake.
It is you, not I that have created these monsters of imprecision, "The fire is extreme among the hot things", e.g., not me. Saying that it is an extreme in a scalar property (or, indeed, as Xorxes points out, beyond a certain limit -- though the predicate doesn't say that) is certainly better than that (and btw would just have a predicate maker, not this strange predicate) . One would like to just say that it is too hot -- adverb-adjective, but you have set things up to make that impossible, just as we can talk about a green house in any ordinary way. These kinds of primitive bad decisions are the sort of thing that should get caught early and corrected, not defended in the face of obvious difficulties. God help us if we try to change the
phonology.
I thought that "dks" worked as intended, but how would you handle "The fire is too hot for x3"?
Sorry, you're right. I misremembered dukse or confused it in my mind with something else. Does it have a place for purpose (it should, but Logjam often forgets that nicety).
Richard's properties (modal) are useful for many things, but are not the last word. As normal cases like "If rats were insects" show, the extension of "rat" in some worlds may contain no rats(as we understand them), which hardly seems right for properties. (A consequence of this mechanism is Goodman's "This is the best of all possible worlds because it *is* all possible worlds") Plato is not a very good case, since, as Aristotle and others before him noted, his system is classically incomplete and entails (unacknowledged, of course) that there is at least a Form of forms? Properties are often not necessary, but also often are. And remember that, given properties, individuals can be eliminated -- but not conversely.
I can't say too much about what a form of forms might be, but I can say that in Montague Semantics, a property is simply a function from worlds to a one-place predicates, which is covered by X "l-" as long as intensional readings are admitted. I believe that "km" would be either redundant or an encumbrance in ordinary Xorban.
My point is just that Richard, dear man that he was, is not Frege nor Church and his notion of properties is defective in just that way. They work for a lot of things, they don't work for a lot of others. I am not clear what you mean by intensional readings of
l but I have come to expect some strange sort of misuse of at least terminology, if not of fact, when you talk this way. Do read up a bit, please, this stuff has been worked over for years.
By "intensional reading" I mean that the predicate place is ranging over the connotations of the supplied argument, rather than over the denotations.
As a rule, don't use "connotation" in general discussions in semiotics; it has more meanings than "meaning" , some of them in direct contrast to others. Where I come from from, it usually means the aura of emotions, sociocultural innuendos, and implications that surround an _expression_ (negativity, etc.). I presume you mean "sense" (Sinn) or Montague's ^ but that does not help me understand your remark. If you mean that
l indicates an intension rather than an extension, this seems simply wrong, since it is a quantifier and, therefore, brings up just member of the universe (some of which may be intensional, of course,
depending on how the whole is set up). On the other hand, if what you want is that the argument place forces an intensional reading, then you are back to the inefficient (doubling of a number of predicates) and misleading (a logicically crucial distinction going unmarked) approach to the issue. You can do that, of course -- English does, God knows -- but the point of this exercise, as I understand it, is to do better.
I read the "properties" article (interesting reading) and related over at SEP,
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/properties/
Thanks for the reference. I ought to take my own advice and read a bit more, even though I don't expect to find much new -- after two and a half millennia -- on properties. But terminology changes and the same old hands get played in new ways (why their are bridge tournaments, after all -- if there still are).
and what I am seeing right now that we already have two or three ways to get at properties:
I tried to figure out what "get at" meant here and am still unsure. Treat tem in language? or logic? or metaphysics? talk about them? use them?
1. Predication. "la fgra glra" means "The fire is hot" and could also be said to mean "The fire instantiates hotness".
You give two translations here which are quite dissimilar (they are probably
materially equivalent, possibly strictly, but almost certainly don't have the same sense). I suppose instantiation is Montague's v (sorry it doesn't show better) and hotness is a property. So? It could also be read as "The fire is a member of the hotties" or "Hotness pervade the-fire-ness" or "The value of the propositional function "...is hot" for the argument "the fire" is Truth", all of which are similarly related to the original. How is this getting at properties, which turn up in just one of these cases -- or are we also getting at classes and propositional functions here? We are, of course, but not in any very informative ways that I can see.
2. Copula. "la fgra le glre vsmlake" means "The fire visually appears hot" and "The fire visually appears to instantiate hotness."
Not clear why this, rather than 1 is called copula. A more direct reading would be "The fire visually appears to be
a hot thing", the introduction of property talk is again gratuitous unless there is some purpose behind it. So, your point is that we can shift to various kinds of talk -- object, property, set, function, etc. -- as we see fit. Right. And the news in this is? And the relevance for constructing a loglang?
If (1) is analyzed as "la fgra le glre mnake" = "The fire is among hot things" or better yet, "la fgra le glre mplake" = "The fire instantiates something hot", then all copula-like constructions, i.e. all those invoking the instantiation of a property, would have similar syntax. "dks" from above meaning "too much" is also in this class IMHO.
This 'analysis' is just another materially equivalent (I hope) sentence, but doesn't analyze anything; it just paraphrases it, at best. The second paraphrase is even less clear because it is not clear what
le glre is meant to be which has instances rather than members (are we back to Mr. Hot?). What this seems to show a lot of sentences can be paraphrased in this instantiation way (whatever that is). What is the significant of this (conceded) fact? dks is not a predicate like vsml or mn or mpl, so doesn't seem to fit the pattern (but then, I am not sure just what is supposed to be similar about these various predicates). For what it is worth, my projections back to Lojban were incorrect: what is needed is not
lo ka but rather
lo ni, which fits in better with the scalar proeprty at issue.
3. Situations. "le fe la fgra glra plkeka'a" means "It's pleasant to me that the fire is hot" which can be viewed as a crude approximation of "The hotness of the fire is pleasant to me."
Well, again, not quite the same, since it is not the property that is pleasing (I am not sure that is ever the case flat out) but just the fact of the blazing fire.
I don't see any problems with the copula-like property-instantiations of 1&2. In these cases properties occur transparently in the "l-" construction or predication, and it would be redundant and needlessly verbose to use extra syntax to call special attention to them. I think "dks" works fine.
But, of course, there is not property reference (transparent or not) in the whole sentence, nor is there any reason for there to be. This works just fine. What is your point?
And where does
dks fit in -- it surely can't replace plk in any meaningful way.
However (3) leaves something to be desired. Literally it says that the situation in which the fire is hot is pleasant, not that the hotness in particular is pleasant. A few possible solutions:
3a. Focus. "le fe la fgra ni glra plkeka'a" = "It's pleasant to me that the fire is HOT". We have seen that "ni" works as focus marker. This solution pushes property references into the realm of the information structure, but it's very versatile and may do the trick in some cases.
Err, What trick?
3b. Periphrasis. le je li fgri mplike glreki plkeka'a. "The hot thing instantiated by the fire is pleasant to me" makes it clear that it's the hotness that is pleasant.
What is the hot thing instantiated by the fire. I would suppose it was the fire. Or, perhaps, the class of hot things -- which do not generally please me. You have gotten farther and farther for plausibly equivalent (in any sense) and this is just off the rail.
3c. Operators. I don't have any proposals yet, because the common logical form of properties seems uncertain, the semantics are blurry, and there are many kinds of properties (e.g. some are self-instantiating and some are not; see SEP article on properties, and several related articles, for other examples). I will only point out that importing "ka" will not work any miracles for us, because "ka" itself doesn't seem to do everything that we need it to do, or at least not
too easily. The "km" predicate doesn't make it very easy to say "the fire's hotness" for example, and, unless I am mistaken, neither does "ka", because the "ce'u" blocks where "lo fagri" would go. These are sometimes called "tropes" but are better called "properties of particulars". There are also relations and the determinable/determinate distinction to consider. If we create something for Xorban then we're going to want it to be both simple and comprehensive, and I don't see that happening until someone creates a lexical taxonomy of properties and the constructions that they can syntactically appear in.
Yes,
ka is not very useful, mainly because it got totally confused at some point and came to try to do too many, conflicting, things. That is the sort of thing that counts as a reason for wanting to start anew building a loglang. (Note btw that ce'u is exactly NOT appropriate for ka as a peoperty marker but rather belongs to the use of ka as a propositional function marker).--
co ma'a mke
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