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I am now also finding that my eyes are glazing over when I read others' contributions on this topic, so I doubt I have anything left to contribute anyway.
If this is a solved problem in formal semantics, can someone *please* find out? Does either pc or And have any formal semanticist friends they could ask? If this is a problem with several schools of thought, could we identify them and just pick one? I find it exceedingly hard to believe that we here now are breaking new ground that noone has worked on for the past 100 years. I'll go further. I find the fact that no jboskeist has ever gone out and referred to papers written by semanticists that might discuss these recurring issues to be incompetence. How can I defend the jboske enterprise to others (hi xod :-) as benefitting from 2 millenia of logic, when I don't see anyone trying to benefit from the last 50 years?
So.Let us assume that we know what lo'ei (Llamban lo'e, the intensional article in general) is.
Let us call my version of lo'e (typical intension) lo'e'aulo'ei cinfo is an intension, an abstraction. It is sense without denotation. It is "satisfied" by any instance of {lo cinfo}. (The notion of 'satisfying' is one that has me worried, and I'll come back to it.)
lo'e'au cinfo is also an intension. But inasmuch as it is 'satisfied' --- as it has a corresponding extension --- that extension is not all lions, as with lo'ei cinfo. It is a subset: all typical lions.
I claim:
lo'e'au cinfo =
lo'ei fadni be lo'i cinfo
So: lo'ei generates an intension out of all lions.
lo'e'au (and I content, lo'e) generates an intension not out of all
lions, but out of all typical lions.
Typical as to what? As to the trait under discussion, whatever is
being predicated of lo'e'au cinfo
What does it mean when we say that something is an ordinary lion?What does it mean (thank you for bringing it up, pc) when we say something is an ordinary unicorn?
I believe ordinary is ultimately extensional: survey all the lions out there, find where most of them (and the most representative ones among them) live, and that's where the typical lion lives.
But what of unicorns? Or dragons?Giles of Putney, 1300 AD has a mental construct of the universe which actually is populated by dragons. He can potentially enumerate them. They are all evil. So as far as he's concerned, the typical dragon is evil. That dragon St George knocked off is evil, that dragon in Beowulf is evil, etc.
Weng Shui, 1300 AD has a different mental construct: still populated by dragons, but they are mostly benevolent.
As far as Giles is concerned, {lo'e cridrdrakone cu palci gi'enai vrude}. As far as Weng Shui is concerned, {lo'e cridrdrakone cu vrude gi'enai palci}. Both are things that need to be sayable in Lojban, even if we thing both Giles and Weng are full of crap.
Similarly for unicorns. The typical unicorn is white. What does that mean? That I am positing a universe where unicorns really exist (and we're getting into possible worlds here --- sorry xod), and in that world, most of them are white.
So it should be possible to make claims of typical entities, even when those entities are fictional. But that means they have to be enumerable. Which means they *do* have to have denotation. So I'll set up a parallel world. Have to count unicorns somewhere, after all.
That's one. Two, the notion of typicality is not limited to numerical supremacy. A claim is typical if most representative of germane classes of the entity in question display it. Say there are 10 flavours of chocolate. I like chocolate, not just if I would like 80% of all chocolates in the world if presented with them. (Presentation is of course the problematic 'satisfying' referred to above.) Rather, that is a generic claim if I like instances from most classes of chocolate.
Now, what is the defining characteristic of these classes? If you like eating choc, it's different flavours. If you are identifying where lions live, OTOH, it's not different places where they live, but more germane classes cutting across them. I haven't worked this bit out yet. for now, I'll quantify that as {rau klesi} too --- though not {rau su'o so'e}.
So I think fadni means something like this:
da fadni lo'i broda ==
su'o py. poi ve djuno
su'o my. poi munje ku'o
rau su'o so'e da
rau su'o so'e de
su'o di poi broda
zi'e poi di klesi da de
zi'e poi di se vasru my. ku'o
rau ty. poi temci ku'o
rau sy. poi stuzi ku'o
zo'u:
veju'o py. ca ty. vi sy.
di broda
I'll note that the {te klesi}, and therefore the precise denotation
of {di poi klesi}, will vary from broda to broda.
So {lo fadni} is still extensional: it still enumerates instances of lions, albeit typical ones. {lo'e'au} extrapolates from those to the intensional abstraction "the typical lion", in a way parallel to how {lo'ei} abstracts from the denotation of 'lion' to 'The lion'. And that's why it is utterly meaningless to say {re lo'e cinfo}.
Now. What does it mean to satisfy an intension, and generate the corresponding extension? Since extensions are real, and intensions are, uh, less real, we need to be able to do this. pc said that "if presented with a given chocolate, I will like it." And says "if presented with a given lion, I will tame it".
(A1) .i mi sisku leka ce'u broda (A2) .i mi sanji ledu'u da broda (A2') .i mi sanji ledu'u leka ce'u broda cu ckaji da (A3) .i mi facki ledu'u da broda (A2') is there because that's how you fill in the value of ce'u.What you want, in going from *kaircitka (I eat intensions, I would eat x if presented with it), to citka, is something like:
(B1) .i mi kaircitka leka ce'u cakla (B2) .i mi sanji ledu'u leka ce'u cakla cu ckaji da (B2a) .i mi jdice la'edi'e (B3) .i mi ca'a citka da (B3?) .i mi kaircitka ledu'u da caklaI have no idea if (B3) and (B3?) are the same thing. I also know that when (A1) is satisfied by (A3), we completely changed predicates, from sisku to fatci. In going from B1 to B3, we're not changing predicates really. This makes me conclude that sisku/fatci is not really illustrating what's going on; And has said this here earlier (intrinsically intensional concept.)
I tame lions => I tame lion X != I seek lions => I find lion XI will add that for Jorge to speak of buska was a spectacularly inept move, because we have no intuitions about buska --- it's not Lojban, after all. And I really cannot see how to generalise it to predicates like {citka} and {xabju} at all.
Moving on, then. Can we define lo'ei without paraphrasing between preds that exist and preds that don't? I'd rather we did. I have no idea if this will work, but I will suggest:
mi tinbygau lo'ei cinfo =
su'o ka ce'u goi ko'a cu ckaji su'onoda zo'u
mi tinbygau ko'a
or maybe
mi tinbygau ko'a poi loka ce'u goi ko'a cu ckaji su'onoda
or just maybe
mi tinbygau lo jai ka ce'u cinfo
I know that {lo jai ka ce'u cinfo} sure ain't countable, and sure has
something to do with an intension -- the intension being {ka ce'u
cinfo}. I'm just not sure it's actually meaningful. But I doubt
{buska} is meaningful either.
Present our lion-tamer with a lion, and he'll tame it. (C1) .i mi tinbygau lo jai ka ce'u cinfo (C2) .i mi sanji ledu'u le ka ce'u cinfo cu ckaji xy (C2a) .i mi jdice lenu tinbygau xy (C2b) .i node fante lenu tinbygau xy (C3) .i mi tinbygau ko'a poi loka ce'u goi ko'a cu ckaji xy (C4) .i mi tinbygau xy(C3) to (C4) is murky to me. But it needs to be doable formally, for the intension to be real to me.
I can't go any further. pc is right that there's more of le'e than lo'e in what I'd said: le'e needs to emphasise speaker discretion in which classes are 'rau', lo'e needs to pretend to be more objective. *Perhaps* rau belongs to le'e and not lo'e at all.
But parting shot: xod is right. John has been hitting men all week? su'o da poi nanmu zo'u: ca'o le prulamji jetfu la djan. cu darxi daWhy must the men being struck have been Mr Man, typical men, or pieces of lambda calculus? This *is* an intrinsically extensional claim.
Moreover, I abided by And's ban on ka'e and ca'a, but I wish I hadn't: (D1) .i mi nu'o facki ledu'u ce'u broda (D2) .i mi sanji ledu'u da broda (D2') .i mi sanji ledu'u leka ce'u broda cu ckaji da (D3) .i mi ca'a facki ledu'u da brodaThe doublet {nu'o facki/ca'a facki} tells me a lot more about the difference between lion-tamers yet to tame a lion, and people actually taming lions right now. Sorry, but it does.
-- **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** * Dr Nick Nicholas, Linguistics/French & Italian nickn@hidden.email * University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net * "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the * circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, * _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. * **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****