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de'i li 2002-12-13 ti'u li 02:01:00 la'o zoi. And Rosta .zoi cusku di'e
>> >There's an out here: you can say stuff about {lo merko} without needing
>> >to know every single American, because you use the sense of the word
>> >rather than its denotation --- the definition, rather than the
>> >enumeration ("An American is defined as..."). But I currently don't
>> >think this extends to {lo'e}. I think lo'e is meaningless without a
>> >notion of surveying: a reasonable sense of what the actual population
>> >does, not just a definition
>>
>> 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
>
>It is because the lo'e-type intension is derived inductively from
>the extension that the other guys are getting this idea of it
>being like a statistical mode. And I think that prototype theory
>would accept that the statistical mode is an important factor
>in defining prototypes, though it is not the only factor nor an
>overriding one.
Since I agree that it is intensional, I don't think that it is like any
statistical function over the extension. The statistical functions,
mean, median, mode, and whatever else are extensional ways to
approximate the intension, but the intension is achieved interally to
the speaker based on s's familiarity with the extension. I do not
insist that each speaker come up with the same intension, but rather
only insist that the meaning of lo'e is such that it requires the
speaker to give more or less equal weight to each member of the
extension, to the degree that s is familiar with the extenision. How
the speaker adds up the properties of each member of the extension is
up to him, as long as each is given equal weight. If the speaker
intentionally gives vastly differing weights to different members of
the extension, then s is being intentionally very misleading.
If the extension is empty, and the speaker knows it, then the speaker
is being highly fanciful about the claim that s is making. If the
speaker doesn't know that the extension is empty, then s must have
gotten s's information about the purported extension somewhere, and is
basing s's intension on that.
As for the usefulness of this, I reiterate the "I like chocolate"
example. If lo'e allows local squinting, then from the statement "mi
nelci lo'e cakla" one cannot conclude that the speaker likes chocolate
in the English sense of the phrase, since s may be squinting locally at
some highly atypical bits of chocolate. If lo'e requires that you give
equal weight to all members of the extension, then you can conclude
that the speaker likes chocolate.
mu'o mi'e .adam.