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Jordan:
> On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 09:27:43PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > Jordan:
> > > On Sun, Dec 15, 2002 at 02:27:56PM -0000, And Rosta wrote:
> > > > Jordan:
> [...]
> > > > > I disagree. o-gadri are out, regardless of the membership of lo'i
> > > > > stedu be mi, because I am talking about a specific thing.
> > > >
> > > > Certainly if you intend to refer to a +specific thing, i.e. something
> > > > involving le'i, then o-gadri are out. But one can speak of someone's
> > > > head without referring to it
> > >
> > > We're talking about refering to it. One ought not to make claims
> > > about their head without refering to it. Claims without refering
> > > to it should be limited to claims of its existence
> >
> > I think we need to concretize which expressions we agree count as
> > referring, and which are permissible in talking about someone's head
> >
> > As things stand, I cannot see why one ought not to make claims about
> > someone's head without using a +specific or LA gadri or ko'a-series
> > KOhA, which is how I would tend to interpret the term 'referring
> > expression'.
>
> Because stuff like
> lo stedu be mi cu cmalymau lo'e plini
> suggests I have multiple heads
Perhaps lo in contrast to loi or lo'e suggests there are multiple
heads, but I don't think that lo in contrast to le does.
"There is something that is my head and is smaller than a planet."
-- doesn't really suggest to me that there is more than one head.
OTOH, using an e-gadri suggests that there is some reason for
selecting a certain subset of lo'i broda, the most obvious reason
being that the certain subset is distinct from lo'i broda.
> This viewing
> da stedu mi
> as a claim about me, not about my head
>
> > > > > lei makes
> > > > > no sense, because it implies there is more than one,
> > > >
> > > > As you know, I think the implication that there is more than one is
> > > > either less with lei than with le, or else equal
> > >
> > > I don't see why you think that
> >
> > The reason for them being equal is if le is distributive and lei
> > is collective; the distinction is pertinent only to groups of more
> > than one
>
> But this is precisely why I think collectives imply there is more
> than one
Okay, I can see that. But I can't see why it doesn't equally apply
to distributives. That is I can see why taking the membership
jointly suggests a multiple membership, but I don't see why taking
the membership separately doesn't also suggest a muliple membership.
> > The reason for lei implicating plurality more weakly is that lei
> > is itself a reference to a single individual (tho not necessarily
> > a single broda), while le quantifies over a set of broda. When
> > I say "the reason", I mean "a reason", because this isn't a
> > matter of right and wrong
>
> But lei references the members of the set also, it just doesn't
> quantify across each individual.
Right. So one reason for using lei, which we agree about, is if
there are multiple members that jointly have a property. Another
reason, which we don't agree about, is if quantification is
redundant and the speaker doesn't want to introduce the complexities
of quantification when it is redundant to do so.
> Since in the case of only 1 member
> of the set treating it as an individual is the same as treating it
> as a mass, and since individuals are more fundamental than masses[1],
> using a mass gadri is odd
>
> [1] In cases where individuals don't really make sense for a
> particular thing, such as water/sand/etc, the brivla are defined
> so that individual references actually reference masses already (le
> djacu is a mass, and lei djacu is a mass of masses), which keeps
> individuals more fundamental
You need to justify your argument that individuals are more fundamental
than masses. I will help you: while it is uncontroversial that
{lo broda cu broda} is always true, is is controversial whether
{loi broda cu broda} is always true, and probably the majority
opinion is that it is not always true. If you accept this reason
then I will agree that not only is there a reason for seeing le
and lei as suggesting plurality to the same extent, and a reason
for seeing le as suggesting plurality to a greater extent, there
is also a reason for seeing lei as suggesting plurality to a greater
extent.
> > I'm not sure what you mean by "we already ruled out o-gadri". Any
> > gadri (apart from lV'i) yields truth when talking of a singleton
> > category. The disagreement is about which gadri most strongly
> > implicates that the category is not singleton. If we had gadri
> > that actually encoded singletonness (in paradigmatic contrast
> > with the other gadri) without any element of genericity,
> > then we wouldn't have to be having this debate.
>
> Lojban goes out of its way to try to not have any difference based
> on number of referents (there's no plural, etc).
I know. I see this as a naive application of antimalropnoism. It's
all very well making tense optional, because this doesn't interact
with the logical structure, but the singular/plural distinction
has logical implications. In hindsight, given all these debates
about singulars, we would have been better with gadri for
singulars and for one-or-mores (which would imply but not entail/
encode plurality).
> Do you just want
> things to depend on plurality? I think there's nothing wrong with
> using "le" for this, as is intended. In cases where the number is
> important we have the inner quantifiers, or we can explicitly state
> the outer quantifier, and such things
I don't want to have to rehash things I've said many times before.
In brief, plurals are logically more complex than singulars,
since the collective/distributive applies only to them, and for
the one and only member of a category the +/-specific distinction
doesn't apply either. Quantification adds processing difficulty,
so redundant quantification is undesirably unnecessary difficulty.
Marking singularity explicitly is undesirable because it paradoxically
requires the additional complexity of an extra word to signal
a lack of complexity, because it turns the singularity into a
claim, and because it still forces a redundant choice among gadri.
--And.