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Nick:
> On Sunday, Dec 22, 2002, at 14:27 Australia/Melbourne, Nick Nicholas
> wrote:
>
> > I commend you guys for your premisses, and blast you for your
> > confusion
>
> I meant 'conclusion'. And in fact i won't think this was a propos
> anyway :-) , because I don't think you are confused anymore; we've got
> a coherent ontology out of you, which is great. The rest is politics,
> and in politics, I overtly proclaim my bias. I am willing to throw out
> some of CLL, but nowhere near as much as you're saying
You exaggerate: your proposal is about as compatible with CLL as
mine is.
> If we can all agree on the ontology, we can leave the remainder (which
> cmavo to which meaning) to the BPFK. We're not quite all on the same
> page on the ontology, but I'm hopeful we'll get there soon
Yes, I agree.
> Oh, and And? Drawing a snake? I think some semanticists would call that
> an intensional snake, rather than a Kind of snake. Recall that in that
> paper I sent out the link to (and noone has been able to get time to
> look at :-) , four classes of intensional predicates were named:
>
> want/need
> seek
> depict
> evaluate (fear, worship)
>
> If you can describe something that has never and will never exist, you
> could be constructing your own world, in which your referent does exist
> (xod's solution); or you could be talking about "Any-x such that x has
> these properties" (Jorge's solution). And, I take it you think drawing
> a snake is drawing the Kind of snake, depicting snake-nature.
Not really. It is more that Unique nullifies transparent/opaque
contrasts. But what distinguishes depict-type intensionals from
want/need/seek/fear is that it can't be analysed as 'sumti-raising'
(i.e. not a case of pixra tu'a lo since): depicting a snake is
not the same thing as depicting there being a snake.
> I think
> the intensional snake (x such that x has snakedom) is a better
> solution, because it's more general...
I don't believe that there is an intensional snake. The property
of having snakedom is not a snake. And "x such that x has snakedom"
needs a quantifier to bing x, which makes it extensional.
Maybe I should believe that there is an intensional snake. Anybody
who can convince me that it exists in logic is invited to try to
convince me.
> (... or maybe not. These singularisations --- prototype, kind, Any-x
> --- are very very very hard to keep apart. I think we're stuck with
> them, but yes, they will be a bear to teach.)
>
> One more thing. the denotation of \lx.f(x), according to the egg-heads,
> *is* the set of x such that f(x). To them, the denotation of the word
> "cat" and the lambda expression \lx.cat(x) is the same: all cats.
> There's a reason they do that, to allow meaning to be compositionally
> built up by combining articles and nouns --- so the articles do the
> quantifier work
> And, in your most excellent scheme, everything starts with {lo'i
> mlatu} and is quantified from there by gadri
>
> But I wonder whether it would not be worthwhile to grant the
> equivalence {lo ka ce'u mlatu} = {lo'i mlatu}...
No. The membership of lo'i mlatu can vary from world to world,
but lo ka ce'u mlatu is independent of worlds. Rightly do we say
lo'i is extensional and ka is intensional.
I don't comment on which of the two the lambda expression is equivalent
to. If I were forced to take a position, I'd go with it being
equivalent to lo'i and not equivalent to ka.
> Nah, probably not, But you can see why the formal-semantic mainstream,
> as far as I can tell, would think that these two *are* equivalent
> (allowing the mid-sentence prenexes that are ungrammatical in Lojban):
>
> mi sisku leka ce'u mlatu
> mi sisku (to ro da poi mlatu zo'u: toi) da
If I can find some way to open the pdf (I don't understand why sometimes
I can open pdfs & sometimes I can't) I'll take a look.
I'd find pixra more interesting a challenge than sisku, though,
because my solution for sisku doesn't work for pixra.
--And.