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Re: [jboske] loi: quantitative claims



And Rosta scripsit:

> > But as far as loi is concerned, the official definition is: anything 
> > that can be predicated of an individual {lo broda} can be predicated 
> > of {loi broda}, and some extra claims (let's call them mass claims) 
> > can also be predicated of {loi broda} 
> 
> I think (with hindsight -- no criticism of CLL is meant) that this
> is deeply misguided. 

So do I, and if CLL says so, then I call it a revolting little object.

*Some* claims of individuals scale up to masses.  But the claim that because
lo djacu may be of millimeter dimensions, loi djacu is also, strikes me as
absurd.  Individual claims cannot be applied to masses in a blanket fashion,
but only in a fact-specific (or selbri-specific, if you like) sort of way.
There aren't just emergent properties (Nick's "mass properties"), but
disemergent properties as well, ones that disappear when you move to the
mass level.

We can recover *some* of these properties by the default pisu'o quantifier --
that's why it's there, so that one does not have to drink all-the-water-there-is
to be said to drink loi djacu, but that is so only of properties that
survive conceptual smushing and reslicing along different boundaries.

> I mean, you can try it for yourself. Is it true that The Beatles
> married Yoko Ono? I think not. Is it true that they wrote
> Strawberry Fields? I think yes, even if only John wrote it.
> There is no generalizable logic to determine which properties
> can and can't be predicated of the group. Encyclopedic knowledge
> and similar extraneous factors enter into our judgements.

+1

-- 
Even a refrigerator can conform to the XML      John Cowan
Infoset, as long as it has a door sticker       jcowan@hidden.email
saying "No information items inside".           http://www.reutershealth.com
        --Eve Maler                             http://www.ccil.org/~cowan