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Adam:
> >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.
I don't understand. Do you or don't you want to claim that they exist in
this world?
> 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.)
That one's easy: ro da ga na gi.
That's not a claim about all even prime numbers greater than 3, though;
it's more like a claim about things in general, and about the property of
being an even prime number greater than 3.
Might you want to make a claim about "most even prime numbers greater
than 3" or "some even prime numbers greater than 3"? I expect you
would, if you want to make claims about all of them.
> 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
If I read that as meaningful, I read it as saying that in a world
like this one but with rich generous lojbanists, every single
one of them is a great help to Lojban. If you explicitly indicated
that you were making the claim only about this world, then I
would conclude that you believed there to be rich generous lojbanists.
If I knew that you believed there aren't rich generous lojbanists,
then I would have no idea at all what you meant; I'd probably read
it as a joke, the point being that it superficially looks meaningful,
and seems to be claiming that lojbanists are helping lojban, but
when you think further, you realize that that's not the case so
read it as a jokey way of saying that no lojbanists are rich and
generous.
> 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.
As I've said in recent messages, I don't think it matters.
> 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 think we do, actually. When I earlier argued that English
"every" is nonimporting, I was misunderstanding importingness.
I haven't been able to think of any use of "every" that is
nonimporting in the sense that turns out to be the relevant one.
> >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.)
However Lojban translates English "100% of" ought to correspond to
Lojban ro. "0% of", "more than 0%", "50% of", "99% of", "100% of" should
behave alike with regard to importingness.
But the issue of importingness is so trivial that the only real need
to bother deciding it is so as to document it and prevent this discussion
from recurring.
Probably the best way to settle it is to declare all quantifiers
nonimporting. Hopefully that keeps us all happy, since half of us
are pro nonimportingness, and the other half don't care.
--And.