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| In a message dated 10/4/2002 10:47:18 PM Central Daylight Time, jjllambias@hidden.email writes: << >? That is, there was a retrograde? The horse whas three-quarters the way >> Well, if I don't ask, I won't learn (not tha asking guarantees learning) but it would be nice if I were a little sharper or you were a little clearer. << I meant that the running is lessening. The most obvious interpretation seems to be that the horse is slowing down, somehow the event is getting away from a central instance of a horse running. (My example was {le xirma cu bajra}, not "runs a mile", that was your example. With "runs a mile" it might indeed suggest backing up, since now the salient property is the distance travelled rather than the running itself.) >> OK, so the quantity of the horse's running has lessened -- probably meaning that it has slowed down(though it might mean that, while maintaining speed, it has slipped into another gait, for example). The" run a mile" case was slipped in just to try to make some sense of your talk of parts of an event (apparently meant as more than just temporal segments). Sorry if it was off track. But if the segments are temporal then the retro parts eems to require taking away segments already played out, which seems harder to do than backing up. Now I see that what you meant (and I really do think this was said obscurely with talk of parts and the like) is taking away some of the quantity of the event. << ><< >Any of those, I think. That the horse is running is somehow >becoming less true. > >> >Whoa, Nelly (he said appropriately)! Where did this "less true" line come >in? Before we were talking about making a complete instance of something, >which, aside from processes, is a little hard to figure but worth some >looking at. But what does that have to do with more or less true Well, one way of not getting up to an instance is by not quite getting to fulfill the truth conditions for full instancehood. >> Maybe, but how does that lead to the claim that when the quantity gets less the claim is less true. The inference probably works the other way but not necessarily this way. A horse going 50mph is truly running (assuming correct gait) and so is a horse going 49mph, though the quantitiy of the running is probably diminished (let's assume it is closely connnected with speed). << >or, worse, >changing truth value toward more or less? Consider a sheet of paper that starts being white and turns yellow with time. One way of describing this is to say that {le papri cu pelxu} starts as false and becomes more true as time passes. Just one way of looking at it. Then {le papri cu piza'ure'u pelxu} describes one point in this extended process. >> I'm not sure about the relation of this to the horse case, but I assume there is one. I agree that that is a way of describing the situation. Another is to say that the quantity of this paper being yellow is greater than before. And this can continue even after the truth of "this paper is yellow" reaches 1. And, of course, what we want to say is something like "Comments on one point in the process, since the {piza'ure'u} is presumably a metacomment. [you don't need the {cu}] << The {pi...re'u} system would not be used to describe the long interval. It only describes one portion of the whole event (much like ZAhOs do). When the truth is falling from the 90's to the 80's we can say {le xirma ca pime'ire'u bajra}, then when it goes from 80's to 100, we say {le xirma ca piza'ure'u bajra}. Just as we say {le xirma ca co'a bajra} when the horse starts to run. >> Ahah! I was thrown off again by the portion talk earlier (as I noted -- "You can't mean this"). So now the point is that at any point during the existence of the paper/ the running of the horse, we can stop to comment how true the claim is that the paper is yellow or the horse is running. And we can do so in reference to earlier (and, I suppose, later) values. OK. But now I don't quite see the analogy with {co'a}: this is only available once in an event and describes an aspect of that event -- really there. The {piza'ure'u} pattern can be used anywhere in the event and describes a (relative) evaluation of a claim about the event (or of the quantity of the event), which is not obviously there at all (well, the quantity probably is -- but the truth value is not). << >But that is nothing about its being >more or less an instance of horse running -- it is about what kind of horse >running it is an instance of, if anything in this area at all (which I >personally need to be convinced of now). Different ways of looking at it. You can say that {co'a bajra} is an instance of starting to run, or you can say that it is the start of an instance of running. >> I'd day it was both but that {piza'ure'u bajra} was neither. {bajra} marks an instance of running and {pizu'aru'e} says something about that instance, but is not another instance of running or of a special kind of running. << ><< >I can't get that much detail in. Just {piza'ure'u pelxu} for >yellowing and {pime'ire'u pelxu} for de-yellowing. > >> >But surely these are different processes not more or less complete (or >retrocomplete) instances of the same process (entropy if nothing else >counts >here). It does not describe the whole process. Just one moment/stage of it. The same is true for plain <n>-re'u. It doesn't describe n instances, just the nth one. >> Wha... ! I thought that we had gotten around to {piza'ure'u} being an evaluation of a moment in an event of some sort. But now we are back to it just indicating a moment in a single event, some portion of that event -- the two-thirds mark or so (well, a further mark or a less far mark). I think I see what you are trying to say, though I am not at all sure that you say this diectly -- and am even less sure that I can say it at all. Let's see. We have the notion of a perfect event of type A and this is such that we can meaningfully talk about being some fraction of the way toward being that event. Then, we can take an actual A event and, at any moment during that event, we can compare the actual event with the ideal and say that it is up to the idealized n/mths of that event. Why we would use ordinals for this is not too clear, except that apparently the stages here are well-ordered. And this comparative scale is correlated with either or both the quantity of the event and the truth of a claim about the event. If this is right, then I am less sure tht the argument establishing the use of {re'u} is a good one. But, on the other hand, it probably doesn't matter, since we weren't using those critters anyhow and this may well be a useful notion to hav represented. |