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cu'u la xorxes
When you say {lo merko}, you claim some objective knowledge of the membership of {American}. The same should hold when you say {lo'e merko}: one should not be intrinsically more subjective than the other.To me, {lo'e merko} is not at all about the membership, i.e. the extension, of {lo'i merko}. It is about its intension.
They are comparable not in extension vs. intension, but in objective vs. subjective claim.
But I'm with Jordan: you may be involuntarily locally squinting, but surely you are thinking you are globally squinting: surely you are thinking you are saying something characteristic of most Americans, when you say {lo'e merko cu mebli nixli}.Under myopic singularization, the concept "most Americans" makes no sense, as there is only one American. Consider what happens when you say {la meris cu melbi nixli}. You are taking {la meris} as a single individual, squinting to see her as a pretty girl even though she probably is not a pretty girl in every instance of her (when she is 43 years old, for example, maybe she is not quite a "pretty girl"). And yet you don't want the claim to apply to a particular time, you squint and you talk as if there is no time and all you see under the circumstances is that Mary is a pretty girl, because that's the relevant part of Mary that stands out in the situation. Similarly, in some odd situation it could be conceived that {lo'e merko cu melbi nixli}. I don't think I would say that in normal situations though.
You've lost me.Sure, future instances of Mary do not meet the claim "pretty girl"; but if I see before me a pretty young Mary, and I call her that, I may have all the delusion in the world that she will never age, but that's immaterial, because the claim is based on the exemplar before me.
I understand squinting to be generalising, not deluding yourself ;) , so we clearly aren't thinking about the same thing.
I think that's the key misunderstanding of {lo'e}. It is NOT about
the enumeration. No averages or modes. It is the sense and only
the sense that matters, much more than with {lo}. You can even
squint {lo'e broda} into existence when {lo'i broda} is empty.
Assertion isn't proof :-) , and these matters aren't subject to proof anyway, just compatibility with existing prescription first, and convenience second. I do understand it to be about modes, because that's what squinting means to me. But I'm sorry: I'm not going to say much else on generics (which is what formal semanticists call this kind of thing) until I've read what the formal semanticists did say about generics in the '70s. Just because some 70s linguist said something doesn't make it true or relevant to Lojban; but I am too busy to reinvent the wheel. And pace And, I think that's why jboske has been so tortuous.
As it is, we mean different things by squinting; it's And's metaphor, so I'm the one who misappropriated it. But like I say, I am not going to get into more typical jboske argling on this without doing my homework first.
And as Adam said, they can legitimately be corrected; they can't with {le'e}.But {le'e} is a different thing, it is about a specific set {le'i merko}. Here we only use the sense of {merko} to help us identify a specific set we have in mind.
We're still talking at cross-purposes. A claim about le'e X is subjective, because the subject knows which particular Americans (and construct thereof) they have in mind. It is a different thing; that's my point. And I think that lo'e makes pretensions to objectivity which le'e doesn't, and that's the distinction between them.
When I squint away the differences between box, one thing they obviously can not have in common, or even have a preponderance of, is colour.{lo'e tanxe cu vrici le ka skari}. "Boxes come in different colours".
Not a contradiction: lo'e merko cu xabju ma .i na'i pa da zo'u lo'e merko xabju da .i lo'e merko cu vrici le du'u ce'u xabju makauWhen I say the typical box cannot have a colour, I mean of course *a* colour. You cannot predicate of it 'blanu' or 'xunre' or whatever. You can say it has sundry colours, but it differs from the specific box in that it can be true of {da poi tanxe} that {da blanu}. It can never be true of {lo'e taxne} that {lo'e tanxe cu blanu}.
Isolating specific colours is the point, since we seek to understand generics by what can be predicated of them.
What colour it has in a given situation depends on the situation.
Again, different presupposition, different conclusion. You have a local squinting, I guess, which is why situation can change what colour the squinted box has. I admit only global squinting, which is independent of context, considering boxes as a global population in themselves. In such a view, situation is irrelevant --- unless the situation is that there has arisen a cult painting all the boxes they ever find blue.
(Of course, this is disingenuous, because the typical box (mode) is of course brown --- cardboard. Should have stuck with home cities of Americans.)
Jorge's intensional box is also a phantom; but unlike the 'typical box', there is an expectation that it will be instantiated by a real box (you'll eventually find one); and that box will have a colour: .i mi nitcu lo'ei tanxe .i xu su'o da zo'u da skari ri .i go'i fa da kaunai The "fill in a blank here" box does have a colour; it's just unspecified and uninstantiated. There's no na'i about it.Very interesting use of {kau}! Can you explain the {nai} there? I would have just used {makau} for "whatever colour".
kaunai means that the value is not known, and not instantiated; but is known to exist and be unique {da}. Is it odd to use {kau} like that? When we say {da kau go'i}, we say that the value is known and is instantiated, but just isn't communicated. When you're asking for a box, you know that whatever box satisfies the request will be a specific, concrete box, and so will have a colour. What colour that will be, noone knows yet; it is, after all, intensionally defined. When you know who killed the butler (kauja'ai), OTOH, there's nothing intensional and fluffy there: the killer of the butler has a denotation known to at least one person.
(I've used ja'ai. Truly the end times are upon us...) -- It appears to be a real script (or a board game), and there are people who want to be able to work with the script as part of the decipherment process. On the other hand, there *is* just the one document (or board game), so there's only so much one can do. (John Jenkins on the Phaistos Disk; Unicode mailing list) Dr Nick Nicholas. nickn@hidden.email http://www.opoudjis.net