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de'i li 2002-11-26 ti'u li 18:17:00 la'o zoi. Jordan DeLong .zoi cusku di'e
>Anyway, to me, it seems that the definition about lo'e broda refering
>to a broda in a world[1] where lo'i broda is singleton is weak: there's
>an infinity of worlds in which lo'i broda is a singleton set,
>so this in effect would make lo'e (under this definition) more or
>less meaningless (unless you just leave it all up to conversational
>implicature, but then the analysis is essentially a nop).
The analysis of lo'e as a singleton was done, as I see it, not to
redefine lo'e, but to clarify it. The original problem with lo'e was
that in most cases the typical member doesn't exist. The typical lion
doesn't exist, since (for example) it has no gender, though all real
existing lions have gender, and so it's not clear what it means to
claim something like 'lo'e cinfo cu xabju le fi'ortu'o', which seems to
be saying that this imaginary being is living in the real Africa. The
point of the myopic singularization was to suggest a way to think about
the generic statement which would make sense of the imaginariness of
the typical lion.
>Furthermore, who gets to say what set of statements are true about
>this new singleton member? If it's not related to the set of true
>statements about all the members in the real world, if there are
>members in the real world[2], then the analysis is clearly wrong,
>in my view, as it essentially says "lo'e means whatever the speaker
>wants it to mean" (which actually might not be bad for le'e ;O ).
This was the major point of disagreement when the thread died down. As
I recall, John and I wanted the abstraction to a singleton to be based
on more or less all the lions in the world, and And and Jorge thought
that it could be based on a small, context-determined set of lions, or
even on just a single lion (to which I responded that they should use
le'e for this). (I'm probably misrepresenting someone's position here,
so please correct me.)
>[1] the part about 'is exactly like this world in every other
>respect' is pretty much impossible imho: if you change lo'i broda
>to a singleton set, you've changed more than just the cardinality
>of that set. For example, if [](x)(Fx -> Gx), different cardinalities
>of {x: Fx} requires different cardinality of {x: Gx}. Furthermore,
>you change the cardinality of any number of other sets due to the
>assignment to truth values of predications about this new single
>member of the lo'e-set.
I never thought of it as using possible worlds, but rather as
suggesting that we reconceptualize this world and think of all lions as
being one, and in fact I think that that's how And originally
formulated it.
mu'o mi'e .adam.