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On Wed, 18 Dec 2002, John Cowan wrote: > Invent Yourself scripsit: > > > It depends on what you mean by "mass". In an effort to clarify the > > terminology, we pretty much agree to use "mass" to refer to the > > mass-gadri, and to use "collective" and "substance" for the two distinct > > concepts which have been mistakenly blurred together as the meaning of the > > mass-gadri. > > Ah. But I absolutely disagree that that was a mistake. It is the > very essence of Lo??anic thinking about masses that Water, piro lei djacu, > is exactly the same as Monkey, piro lei smani. They are not arbitrarily > divided into "substance" and "collective" based on English/SAE thinking. > (I am avoiding "Mr." here, even though JCB and I have used it, because > it seems to invoke confusion.) I don't seem to be explaining myself clearly. You are talking about the conflation of individuals with quantities of substances. That's fine, I like it, and I support it, by using le for both of them. What I am really saying here though, which nobody is addressing, is that we should reserve mass-gadri for collectives. And disambiguate collectives from substances, because they are very different things. Collectives and substances have very little in common. -- // if (!terrorist) // ignore (); // else collect_data ();