[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

RE: [jboske] Why ro is importing & nobody should mind



> On Sat, Nov 09, 2002 at 07:23:04PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > 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} 
> 
> Why would you want to say that?  Since there's no unicorns, any
> statement about all of them is pretty boring.  I can say {ro
> pavyseljirna cu xekri} and be correct also 

Not according to my beliefs. I believe that all unicorns are white
and some, but not all, are male.
 
> The claim you're actually wanting uses some sort of a generic, and
> I guess if ro isn't importing {lo'e} would work (if it is importing,
> however, because lo'i ro pavyseljirna would be empty, and the inner
> quantifier on lo'e is ro also, I don't think it would work) 

I'm not after a generic; I'm after ways to make claims about various 
fractions of the extension. I won't here reply to the other points,
because they pertain to different threads (lo'e, and the meaning
of ro as a cardinality).

> I think this discussion is pretty seperate from realistic discussion
> of unicorns 

This is exactly my point. The plausible examples of supposedly
empty sets that we want to quantify over in ordinary usage
turn out to be ones that are nonempty in the world the claim
is made about.

> > Second, I wanted De Morgan to work. De Morgan with importing ro 
> > fails precsisely when the quantified set is empty 
> 
> That is pretty lame.  I don't think we want naku rules to "sometimes
> work" 

Why not? The occasions when they do work would be those that I expect
would include all actual usage. The rules themselves would be 
principled and consistent. The only objection to the rules would be
if they made us say what we didn't mean, or forced us to paraphrase
to avoid saying what we didn't mean, but afaics this wouldn't happen.
 
> > 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 
> 
> You want generics again, I think.  Probably le'e?

No. ro and su'o, 100% and >0% of the membership of the set of
things that in the world where unicorns exist are unicorns.

Nothing special about unicorns here -- similar goes for things
like "students who get over 80% in the test". 

> If not there's nothing to prevent you from claiming {lu'a pi PA
> lo'i pavyseljirna cu broda} for any PA or any broda, and being
> perfectly correct 

Not by any sensical epistemology I can think of. Every claim is
true or false of a given world. Give me a set of truth conditions
and a world, and I'll tell you whether the claim is true of
that world or not.
 
> Of course, Lojban doesn't prevent us from lying, no?  For example,
> if you were telling a story to child about unicorns, I'd expect you
> would use su'o and such and lead the poor kid to believe they're
> actually real 

I think you're missing the point, perhaps because you joined the
list after the umpteenth unicorn (or Sherlock Holmes) debate 
occurred. Not every sentence is a claim about This World. Some
are claims about other worlds. It is glorked from context which
world is being spoken of, though there are supposed to be ways
to be explicit about it, though these remain controversial and
unresolved. (da'i, da'i nai, ka'e, ca'a...)

So when there is no explicit world marker, one must be glorked
before the truth of the bridi can be evaluated. 

What would mislead the child would not be using su'o; it
would be using any quantifier with restricted quantification
and the marker for This World.

I'm not making any of this up. This was the uncontroversial
consensus the last time this debate (about imaginaries) came up. 
The unresolved issue is the lexical mechanism for indicating the 
world the bridi is claimed to be true of.

> [...]
> > To summarize:
> > I see no practical reasons (usage, sayability) why ro shouldn't
> > be importing 
> 
> Well there is the usage of lo'i broda, where it is the empty set 
> But I'm guessing you want to include possible unicorns also 
> 
> There's another more sinister problem with this:  it makes *all*
> universal claims false.  Because for anything of the form where in
> this world Ax(Gx -> Fx), we can make another state of afairs where
> there's another Gx which isn't Fx.  If you want Ax to iterate over
> the possible values which aren't even in the current universe, I
> think it's more destructive to the logical system than our inconsistency
> with De Morgan 

Read what I've said above & see if you still think this.

Your comments above and below all make much more sense to me if
you weren't aware of the convention of the implicit world-indicator.
 
> > The ro = 100% argument gives a principled reason why ro should
> > be importing 
> 
> But ro *isn't* 100%, pa is.  100% == 100/100 == 1 

See earlier reply to just this: "!00% of the men" != "one of
the men". It's "100% of" that I equate with ro.

> > The fact that we want to say true things about {su'o pavyseljirna}
> > means that nonimporting ro wouldn't make our problems go away 
> 
> I don't think we want to say such things except when lying (which
> is a perfectly legitimate application of the language) 

I'm not sure whether you really mean this, or it is just a rhetorical
flourish, but if you mean it, then the response is that Lojban must
be open to multiple metaphysicses. Not only is it not our job to
dictate to others a correct metaphysics; we are also pledged to 
try to avoid building metaphysical constraints into the language.
I'm sure Lojbab and xod would back me up on this, so it's not some
kind of jboscological perversion I'm espousing here.

--And.