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Nick:
> Right. Let's see if I've got this correct
>
> lo'e is defined by the phrase {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko}. Any
> definition of lo'e which is incompatible with that phrase violates
> the baseline, makes a nonsense of any distinction between lo'e and
> le'e, is doomed to be shouted down, and in my opinion (and not just
> my opinion) can sod off
>
> The concern is that, because a prominent Lojbanist has hijacked lo'e
> to his own ends, lo'e has stopped being "member of the gadri
> paradigm, in paradigmatic relation with le'e and lo", and has started
> being "that cmavo Jorge uses." This is intolerable, and Lojbanists
> who wish to uphold the baseline have a duty to uphold the proper
> lo'e. I'm now of the opinion that the rot has set in so greatly, that
> a clarification on lo'e needs to be included in a note in the lessons
>
> Jboskeists of sundry persuasions have been argling about lo'e for
> years, and frankly, I tuned out long ago. So if this has been said
> before, no apologies from me: it was your responsibility to keep
> things coherent enough that I not tune out. This certainly includes
> pc, who as far as I can tell hasn't got a paedagogical bone in his
> body
There's no issue of baseline-incompatibility here (though there may
be with le'e, because the baseline le'e is not a proper e-gadri
counterpart of lo'e, but that is excusable, since working out
how lo'e & le'e work has been such a difficult problem). We all
understand very approximately what lo'e means -- that it is the
gadri for handling generics. But only two Lojbanists have come
up with sustained and relatively coherent (-- coherent enough
to be debated, at least) explicit accounts of these gadri -- Jorge
and me.
If some other sustained, coherent, explicit account emerged, which
was incompatible with the two existing accounts, and which was
generally preferred, then the meanings that Jorge and I attribute
to lo'e & le'e could be assigned to experimental cmavo. So there
are really two issues that pertain to a given proposal about what
such and such a cmavo means: (1) is the proposal internally
coherent, (2) is it the appropriate meaning for the given cmavo.
Confusing these two issues ends up wasting a lot of time.
Jorge's account of lo'e is pretty straightforward. Intuitively,
think of how to render "lion-tamer" ("I'm a fully qualified
lion-tamer, though I have not had the chance to tame a lion,
yet") with "lion" as sumti of "tame". The solution to that
generalizes to box-needing, chocolate-liking, lion-inhabitedness,
and so forth. Formally, too, it is pretty straightforward,
based on the analogy across these axiomatic equations:
sisku tu'o ka ce'u broda = 'buska' lo'e broda
kairnitcu tu'o ka ce'u broda = nitcu lo'e broda
kairbrode tu'o ka ce'u brode = brode lo'e broda
Jorge's reiterations of this are not an attempt to ram idiosyncrasy
down the throats of a hapless speech-community, but rather a
response to pc's challenges (which I find incomprehensible, so
I can't comment further on them).
[...]
> What does "I like chocolate" mean? It means 'chocolate' is being
> taken as the exemplar. It's an abstraction out of the whole bunch of
> chocolate out there; but it's a representative abstraction. Hence the
> gloss 'typical'. And that's not just a mass, as Jorge had pointed
> out, because a mass still leaves you with just 'some' chocolate
> (Trobriand island talk notwithstanding: Mr Chocolate is *not* the
> same thing as 'exemplar of chocolate', and I think the confusion
> between the two underlies much of the difficulty --- we have been
> overusing loi at the expense of lo'e.)
>
> So when you say you like chocolate, you are abstracting away from
> real claims, involving individual pieces of chocolate (real and
> potential), and saying that you've liked enough pieces of choc,
> enough of the time, in enough places and enough forms, that you feel
> you can generalise
But we all agree on this much, except that we need to be careful
about saying what is or isn't the Lojban equivalent of Mr Rabbit,
since we don't agree whether Mr Rabbit has 2 ears or several million.
Loi ractu has several million, and (IMO) lo'e ractu has two.
But the commonsensical view you articulate does run into all sorts
of problems, such as whether lo'e cakla cu cakla, and if so,
whether lo'e cakla du lo cakla and lo cakla du lo'e cakla. It's
these sorts of issues that need to be worked through in the
context of a formal understanding of the workings of lo'e.
> What does lo'e broda mean in general? It is meaningless unless an
> assertion is predicated of it: it does not have a denotation, a
> concrete referent in the world. It is an intension: an abstraction
> out of things in the world, with regard to a specific claim, which is
> true or false of that abstraction. As a result, it is uncountable,
> and unquantifiable.
If the difference between {lo'e broda} and {tu'o ka ce'u broda}
is some kind of use/mention distinction, then this is what Jorge
has been trying to formalize.
> So
>
> lo'e broda cu co'e
>
> means something like
>
> rau su'oso'e da poi broda ku'o
> rau su'oso'e de poi temci ku'o
> rau su'oso'e di poi stuzi ku'o
> rau su'oso'e su'u bu'a kei
> rau su'oso'e daxi4 zo'u:
> da co'e ca de vi di
> fi'o bu'a daxi4
>
> It is true to say {lo'e cinfu cu xabju le friko}, because most lions
> live in Africa most of the time; and *enough* lions live in Africa
> *enough* of the time, that we are entitled to make a generic claim
I think we can agree that this is a sort of context when it makes
sense to say {lo'e broda cu brode}.
But if it is an explicit formalization then it needs to be
interrogated carefully. For example, it makes {lo'e} sensitive to
quantifier scope (unlike in Jorge's & my versions).
I don't mean that in a negative way; it seems quite promising
& appropriate that it should be scope-sensitive, because it
would distinguish between
"The lion lives in Africa"
= "The generic lion is such that it lives in Africa"
"I study the lion"
= "I am such that I study the generic lion"
!= "The generic lion is such that it is studied by me"
[the English glosses don't properly capture the distinction]
> But that generic claim is subjective and culture-specific, as xod has
> pointed out. It is up to me, the speaker, to decide for each
> utterance how many lions are enough to start making claims about
> them, and how many kinds of chocolate are enough for me to decide I
> like chocolate in general. If {rau} in the above had an x2 place, it
> would be something like:
>
> lei raumei cu banzu lenu xusra lo sucta poi skicu lo kulnu steci
> sidbo be lo broda
>
> And so we turn to the Llamban lo'e. I don't understand it yet. I
> understand it a little better with his buska, but still not enough to
> see the point
>
> But I know this. In Lojban {lo'e}, as defined by CLL, it is true to
> say that {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko}. If I go looking for a lion
> in Llamban, and find one in Iran, it is false to say:
>
> ge mi *buska lo'e cinfo
> gi ge mi stufa'i lo cinfo pe vi le gugdrirana
> gi lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko
I don't understand why it is false.
> What are the properties of the Llamban {lo'e cinfo}? Why, the
> properties of Lojban {piro loi cinfo}. It can live in Africa, and it
> can live in Asia: both are true. It does, after all, stand in (in
> some wierd way) for {le ka ce'u cinfo} --- which is satisfied by
> Iranian as well as African lions. Its only true properties are the
> properties intrinsic to lionhood --- e.g. being a mammal. Not the
> properties incidental to lionhood but general to it, such as living
> in Africa. In Llamban, you can't say {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko}
> any more than you can say {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le gugdrirana}
Jorge can comment on this better than I can, but it seems to me
that both {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le friko} and {lo'e cinfo cu
xabju le gugdrirana} are true (which is still not an outcome you
want). (On my story of lo'e/le'e, the truth conditions are about
the same as for the English equivalents -- "The lion lives in Iran",
etc. -- I think.)
[Is {gugdrirana} well-formed? Is it the penult stress that stops it
breaking up into {gugdri ra na}?]
> You want an intensional article, Jorge? More power to you. But cease
> using lo'e for it. lo'e has a defined meaning already, and it's a
> much needed meaning; it *is* how you say "I like chocolate". {lo'e}
> is *an* intensional article, but it's not the all-purpose intensional
> article you seek. Not while {le'e} exists --- which is also an
> intensional article {lo'e} is in a paradigmatic relation with.
On a llambian view, {le'e broda} should be the intension of
{le'i broda} just as {lo'e broda} would be the intension of
{lo'i broda}. The official gloss of {le'e} is definitely 'broken'
-- that is, it definitely violates paradigmatic systematicity
because instead of participating in the pattern
lo'e : lo'i :: le'e : le'i
it Officially means "le du poi ke'a du lo'e broda" (or at least
that is how I think people got to "the stereotypical").
> Not
> while CLL exists --- which clearly makes a claim of Lions living in
> Africa incompatible with the Llamban {lo'e}
>
> You are damaging Lojban by claiming {lo'e} is something it is not,
> Jorge. You have taken a reasonably well defined cmavo, and spread
> confusion about it. You've had your chance to convince us that you're
> right, and that {lo'e} should be something else. But you've been
> refuted: everyone either ignores this lo'e of yours, or mocks it as
> Llamban. And has been doing so certainly since I rejoined the lists.
I hope that means "And everyone has been doing so". I don't ignore
Jorge's lo'e, and I certainly don't mock it as Llamban, which is an
annoying rhetorical stunt pulled by pc.
But out of the three proposals on the table:
Jorge: 'Intensional'
And: 'Singularizing'
Nick: 'Generic Quantifier'
I do feel that the specific cmavo {lo'e} and {le'e} should have
the Singularizing or Generic Quantifier meanings. I continue
to feel that Intensional is too far from the genericity that is
at the core of lo'e/le'e.
Of the other two, Generic Quantifier needs to be looked at in more
detail, but my first impression is that it really calls for a quantifier
more than a gadri (were it not the case that the o-gadri/e-gadri
distinction makes sense for it).
> For the good of the language, use an experimental cmavo for your
> intensional article, and leave {lo'e} alone
>
> Or, if you persist, grow a thick hide. (OK, an even thicker hide.)
> Because I regard persistence in anti-baseline usage, even after due
> discussion and vetting, to be humpty-dumptying, and an act of
> contempt against the collective. If you're not prepared to write in
> Lojban, I'm not prepared to read you
This is very unfair. Jorge's and my analyses were the only ones on
the table, and it had not yet been established whether they were not
equivalent.
The way to proceed is not to harangue Jorge but to present a
counterproposal that better captures the core meaning of lo'e
and le'e. You have made a start at doing this. If it turns out
to be coherent, then we can agree that Intensional is not the
meaning of lo'e, and needs to be switched to an experimental
cmavo.
I will add the following to the wiki:
lo'ei Intensional o-gadri [candidate meaning for lo'e]
le'ei Intensional e-gadri [candidate meaning for le'e]
loi'e Singularizing o-gadri [candidate meaning for lo'e]
lei'e Singularizing e-gadri [candidate meaning for le'e]
... so as to take the heat out of debate.
--And.