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Re: lo'edu'u



We are quickly heading for a solomontean solution to lo'e . Before we get there though:

1. If there is no constraint on any squinting of lo'e being done in a way *representative* of the population, but is wholly at the discretion of the speaker, nothing stops them from making a singularisation like "take only the Americans I've actually met, and exaggerate all their traits I dislike". In effect, lo'e merko can mean the same thing as le'e merko in the right context.

On his current gap-filling bender :-) , And would rejoice in this, since that is in fact his understanding of le vs. lo in general: that le, being specific, is a particular instance of lo.

Two retorts. One, the definition has been 'typical' vs. 'stereotypical'. People regard these as disjoint, rather than le'e a subclass of lo'e. (And enough people have made this complaint that it is, IMO, the majority understanding of the issue, which any eventual solution must encompass.)

Two, le isn't just +specific, it's also -veridical. I think this is being ignored wrongly. le is not truly a subclass of lo.

2. And pleads for Trobriander logicians, and why should anything we say about {lo'e gerko} = Mr Dog be based on individuals, rather than allowing Mr Dog to be the basic concept.

I say this is bogus. Lojban propagandises about minimising metaphysical constraints, but the whole point of the Loglan exercise has been to insert a *humungous* metaphysical constraint in the works: the machinery of Western logic. That's why we have masses and sets, and most languages don't. Anyone speaking Lojban has to deal with what an indivudual, a mass, and a set are. If the Trobrianders can come up with a logic that admits of Mr Dog but still has sensible things to say about masses and sets, fine. But since Western predicate logic *is* based on the individuals (there are only entities and predicates in model-theoretic semantics), I don't think we have anything to apologise for here.

Don't listen to the propaganda. Lojban has a huge cultural biases squarely embedded in it, on purpose. It just claims to minimise the rest. (And JCB, as pc has reported, probably naively thought that Western logic was objective and unbiased and didn't really force a particular way of doing things anyway, because its premisses are "self-evident". Yeah, self-evident to Westerners, because of a neat chicken-and-egg effect: Classical notions of logic do underly how Westerners regard the universe.)

3. http://www.herald-sun.com/ncmls/

The original habitat of red wolves included forests, wetlands, mountains and coastal prairies, throughout the southeastern United States from Pennsylvania to Florida and as far west as Texas. Dens are often located in hollow trees, stream banks and sand knolls. Today, more than two-thirds of red wolves live in captivity at zoos, nature centers and museums. Nearly all of them that live in the wild now live in Eastern North Carolina, at the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuges.

Gedanken to make sure I follow:

The prototypical Red Wolf lives in the wilds of the South (because that's where he 'ought' to live.)
The typical Red Wolf lives in a zoo.
In the solomontean solution, {lo'e xunre labno} might be said to live in either, but presumably will by default live in the wilds of the South

4. The solomontean solution effectively wants a cmavo to attach to the gadri, qualifying its epistemology. Since this is impossible, let us at least insist that if this comes to pass (and I'm not a massive fan right now), it attach to the sumti rather than the selbri --- since the selbri is innocent of whatever people get up to when squinting. That means not {lo'e merko be ma'e lesi'o cmacrnaveradja}, but {lo'e merko NE ma'e lesi'o cmacrnaveradja}

-------------------- =================================---------------------- Dr Nick Nicholas. Unimelb, Aus. nickn@hidden.email; www.opoudjis.net
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