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Why ro is importing & nobody should mind



Here's why I had preferred nonimporting ro:
First, I wanted to be able to say {ro pavyseljirna cu blabi} without
having to claim that you can go out and find unicorns, and without
having to rephrase to {ro da ga na pavyseljirna gi blabi}.
Second, I wanted De Morgan to work. De Morgan with importing ro 
fails precsisely when the quantified set is empty.

But I think we were wrong that this meant that we sorely need
nonimporting ro.

Let's take the unicorn case first. I want to be able to say
{ro pavyseljirna cu blabi}. But I also want to be able to say
{su'o pavyseljirna cu blabi} and {su'o pavyseljirna cu nakni}.
But there's no dispute about the importingness of su'o. So it
turns out that when I want to talk about unicorns I'm 
talking about a nonempty set of things that are unicorns in
a world where unicorns exist.

I don't see any difference between 'ro' and '100%', and it seems
clear to me that 100% should be importing, so I hold that 'ro'
must be.

When we ordinarily want to truthfully quantify over apparently
empty sets we are in fact quantifying over sets that are nonempty
in some world other than This One. So the apparent failure of 
De Morgan does not in fact arise, except in extremely contrived
examples.

I don't give a shit about whether or not "ro da" is true in an
empty universe.
Nor do I give a shit about whether "ro broda je na broda cu
brode" is true -- i.e. quantifying over sets that are empty in
all possible worlds. Or rather, I think it is always false, and I 
don't care, because it doesn't stop us saying any of the things
we want to say.

To summarize:
I see no practical reasons (usage, sayability) why ro shouldn't
be importing.
The ro = 100% argument gives a principled reason why ro should
be importing.
The fact that we want to say true things about {su'o pavyseljirna}
means that nonimporting ro wouldn't make our problems go away.
The "some logicians hold that ro isn't importing" argument is
on its own not decisive, and the philosophical implications of
opting for importing ro kick in only in contrived examples that
have no bearing on ordinary usage.

I haven't shown how to be explicit about which world the
quantificand exists in, but this is a known, different and more
general problem.

--And.