Re: [engelang] Xorban: Properties - engelang messages

On Thu, Oct 25, 2012 at 5:40 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

From: Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com>

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.

I will refrain from "connotation" henceforth.

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.

IMHO it's not inefficient because it's simply part of the meaning of a predicate whether a given argument place is extensional (special case) or intensional (general case, *not* contrastive case as suggested by the prospect of "doubling" predicates), just as it's part of a predicate's definition that "lo ka mamta" entails "lo ka fetsi" (special) whereas "lo ka prenu" does not (general wrt gender). No need to call attention to "fetsi" in the morphosyntax, even if Esperanto's creator felt otherwise.

By the way, what's your take on djuno and krici? How did those make it into L syntax without requiring distinct NU abstractors?

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?

Just use them, or use the formula-like version of them, whatever you wish to call that.

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.

What I gave were intended as meanings, not translations. Obviously no one is going to use the second one as a translation.

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.

If you agree that the meanings are materially equivalent, then that's good enough for my purpose here. As far as L ni, I am sure that we will be considering that in the future for comparative constructions.

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.

Yeah, there is a subtle difference involved, but what we want to do is to put our finger on the logical form of that difference. Because there are so many understandings of "property" floating around, I am not sure that word is helpful. To me, a "property" is the (Montague ^) intension of a one place-predicate. To you, it's some sort of quality. To L ka, it seems to be a third thing, something like the predicate itself.

On top of this, deriving "hotness" from "hot" may be backwards. Perhaps what we want to do is start with "x1 is the heat of x2" as the primitive concept, and then a create polar or scalar metric primitives meaning plentiful/abundant and meager/scant. Then, we can define hotness as "abundant heat" and hot in turn as "having hotness". So maybe the solution to getting to your properties involves lexical design rather than syntax.