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de'i li 2002-11-09 ti'u li 19:23:00 la'o zoi. And Rosta .zoi cusku di'e
>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.
Unicorns was used as an example, because we all consider unicorns to
not exist. Non-importing ro gets interesting when we don't know whether
the subject term is empty or not.
>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.
If you're talking about a different world, then 'su'o' and 'ro' will
quantify over the individuals in that world; this is a different issue
and not relevant to the existential import of ro. I want to make claims
about things *in this world* which may turn out to not exist. For
example, I may want to make a claim about all even prime numbers
greater than 2. (This isn't a great example, but I'm sure that math is
a subject where making claims about things which may turn out not to
exist is very common.) I may want to say "ro dincfu je du'atce jbopre
cu mutce le ka sidju la lojban." The subject term there is probably
empty, but nevertheless I think it's a true statement, and would be a
true statement if the subject term were not empty.
At any rate, we could do what xorxes suggested and make quantifiers
ambiguous as to existential import; that is more or less how natural
languages work. In general, I think it would be good for the logical
language to explicitly define all the semantics of its quantifiers, but
if we can't agree, then de facto ro will be ambiguous. At any rate, I
intend to use ro without existential import, since that's how I tend to
use 'all', etc. in natural languages.
>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.
If anything, there's no difference between 'piro' and '100ce'i'. I
suppose that probably 'piro' will have to have the same import as 'ro',
but I suppose that that's a silghtly different issue. I'm not sure
whether there's a difference between 'piro' and '100ce'i', but I find
that irrelevant to whether piro or ro is importing. I don't see why
100ce'i is necessarily importing, and even if it is, the difference
between piro and 100ce'i could just be one of existential import.
(If anyone hadn't figured it out, I vote Jordan.)
mu'o mi'e .adam.