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Keeping it superficial..
Nick:You guys really did prematurely declare victoryIn the sense of a collective victory on achieving consensus?
The latter.
But I don't understand your "lo'ie != lo'ei". Nobody has proposed a "lo'ie", and the only person who thinks that "lo'e" or "loi'e" = "lo'ei" is xorxes.
The latter was what I meant; but Jorge's acquiescence that his intensional is commensurate to the singularisation was critical in reaching the consensus.
I think what's emerged is (a) there is more than one way to singularise; (b) the lambda intensional generic is a singularisation; (c) it's not the only possible or useful singularisation; (d) it perhaps shouldn't be encompassed by lo'e as per "The Lion lives in Africa."
The ability to use the singular generic for that is a byproduct of its singularity. (Xorxes has been saying this all along, but it has dawned on me only now. Yet more proof of the law of XIAR/JIAR.)
We're having a lot of these "So that's why you said that!" revelations lately; I presume that's because we don't have the same backgrounds in logic. I mean, even with ten pages of formal semantics this morning, I can see why Jorge would conflate the Typical generic and the 'Any' Intensional generic; they are spoken of in the same breath in Formal semantics, and indeed are both expressed in the same way in English, as bare plurals. (The point of Carlson's paper is to argue that they are in fact the same thing --- but Carlson needed to account for English, so he would say that, right...)
I dunno; I found myself yet again furious at Jorge, and I know that's counterproductive. So yes, Jorge can try expanding the meaning of a cmavo in direction X, because of perceived similarity Y; this may or may not mean the rest will follow.
Once there is only one broda, "I'm looking for a doctor" is like saying "I'm looking for John" or "I'm looking for water", and the opacity effect goes away.
... until you start predicating extra stuff of the singularity, right? Because "any doctor" and "the average doctor" are certainly not the same thing.
And that isn't what lo'e is defined as, dammit. lo'e is defined as 'typical' Even prototypical won't do, and And is being silly if he claims it does. Under no understanding of birds are penguins typical or even prototypical birds. Yet, if you're looking for a bird, and find a penguin, then you're satisfiedThat's because the penguin IS Mr Bird! In Mr Bird's world, the penguin in your garden and the sparrow in mine are the same individual.
And herein our misunderstanding. Because of course I didn't think of prototype in that way. And there is a long-running confusion as to what this Mr Bird is in Lojban; until recently, after all, we all assumed it was {loi cipni}. For all I know, it may in fact still be loi} and not {lo'e}.
You can see them as different individuals rather than being Mr Bird, but then I can see Nick-in-2001 as a different individual from Nick-in-2002, rather than both being Mr Nick.
Which is where Carlson's going. I don't think it's illegitimate for Lojban to have an ontological bias, like I said; it has a bias anyway by using Western logical machinery.
You are construing "prototypical" to mean "a possibly imaginary
exemplar of all the properties category members typically have".
By "Prototype" I mean conceptualizing a category as an individual,
and that's the sense that {loi'e/lei'e} have. (I will cease to
ascribe it to {lo'e/le'e} because that former apparent-consensus
has lapsed into controversy.)
OK. In which case, honest question: is the penguin encompassed by the prototype of 'bird' in prototype semantics? My impression was no, and that's why the prototype bird excludes penguins. In your take it does --- vacuously so --- and your prototype is probably indeed indistinguishable from lx.bird(x). But I didn't think that's how 'prototype' was used in semantics.
So it now looks to me that, if we resolved "I'm looking for a doctor" in Lojban as {mi sisku leka ce'u mikce}, then we should resolve this intensional article with {ka}, as something like {le jai ka ce'u mikce} (or {se ka}, or whatever.) And if this discussion were not so utterly free form, I'd be able to find where someone had an objection to thatSisku x2 (ka) is an abomination. I prefer djica x2 (nu) . But as I say above, singularization annuls opacity, so copes with nitcu x2 ('object').
sisku x2 may or may not be an abomination, but it is a fact of Lojban. That said, the "I want to talk to a doctor/any doctor" is a far far better illustration of this intensional doctor, because we don't need to get sidetracked by {buska}. (Sorry, Jorge, but I do think that backfired.)
Walk me through the last bit. Singularisation annuls opacity. So, an individual unsingularised population allows an ambiguity between "I need a/any doctor" and "there's this particular doctor I need" --- because in the former you're allowing arbitrary choice in a population on the spot (opacity), and in the latter the choice has been made way beforehand by the speaker (transparency). When you have a population of one --- and singularity does that --- there's no difference. So in "I need Mr Doctor", there's no distinction between choosing any one and having already chosen one; there's only one there. Right?
OK, I see why you'd be saying that. But still, the minute you allow anything extra to be predicated of that Mr Doctor, it becomes useless as an intensional article. So either: lo'e mikce is lx.mikce(x) *and never* The Average/Median Dr, or lo'e mikce is The Average/Median Dr and never lx.mikce(x). Yes?
In which case, we're back to a cmavo split. And we're also back to deciding (a) which sense is more useful, so that it gets the shorter cmavo lo'e; or alternatively (b) which sense is closer to the CLL prescription, so that it keeps lo'e.
My opinion is still that (b) wins out, that the Median is closer to the CLL's lion, and that something *like* {se ka} or {jai ka} would be good for the intensional lo'e, since it would directly and mnemonically tie in with the {sisku x2} (a fact on the Lojban ground.)
I may yet yield and accept lo'e is not {le fadni be lo'i broda}, but this intensional. I haven't yet. And I persist on fundamentalist grounds 9and by the by, because I'm still unclear on how le'e fits in to this.) Now, that said, yes, I may well be overinterpreting or misconstruing CLL, and as you say, John hinted something in this direction. So did Bob, by saying "typical? sure, prototypical".
But I don't think we understand the same thing by 'prototypical'. You're talking Mr Bird, which includes penguins. I'm talking cultural default 'bird', which excludes them. And of course, this is why I said {lo'e cinfo na xabju le gugdrxirana}, whereas Jorge would admit {lo'e cinfo cu xabju le sralo}.
That said, Jorge had {lo'e xunre labno} living in the wilds of the South, and {loi xunre labno} living in captivity. Which to me sound like my version of prototypical: "proper red wolves" live in the wilds of the South, "the mass of red wolves as we veridically know them" live in captivity. I think.
I don't know where this is going. "any doctor" and "the typical doctor" are clearly separate things. Logicians may well have found ways to conflate them; but I think we should keep them separated in Lojban anyway, to avoid confusion. So if we accept that, we have to pick whether fundamentalism or utility determines which keeps lo'e; which one the baseline hints at; and whether some sort of {jai ka} trick will work after all.
Hang on, though. Until today, only Jorge said "lo'ei" is equivalent to "lo'e/loi'e", *without disputing the meaning of "lo'e/loi'e"*. As of today, I finally see what he meant.
Please spell it out, just so I'm sure I get it. As long as there's any singularisation, you'll get *a* Mr Doctor, and if you want such an abstraction as Mr Doctor, you're clearly going to settle for any avatar of Mr Doctor, otherwise you'd have said something else. Is that it?
Perhaps. Like I say, though, I don't know that Mr Doctor is lo'e mikce. In fact, I don't know yet that s/he isn't {loi mikce} after all. Massification suppresses individuation, so the choosing of opacity vs. transparency is sidestepped there too. Isn't it?
-- **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** * Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@hidden.email * University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net * "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the * circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson, * _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. * **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** **** ****