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Nick, you debate the question of whether properties of Collectives
can be inherited from their members and vice versa.
I think the way to see it is this. Collectives are many-membered
individuals. We should therefore reason about them exactly as
we reason about individuals. And that reasoning is pragmatic,
varying from case to case. There is no underlying logic (or at
least, if there is, it is for philosophers to discover, not
jboske). For example, if we say a computer calculates the square
root of 313, even though it is the CPU that performs the
calculation, but we don't say "the whole of my computer
calculated ..." and nor do we feel the need to say "a fraction
of my computer calculated ...". But if the LED light for the
Shift Lock on my keyboard is broken, I might say "a fraction
of my computer is broken" but I wouldn't say "my computer is
broken".
How are Collectives different from Substance? They're orthogonal.
Collectives (= mei, nonfundamentalistically) can be countable
(nonSubstance) or uncountable (Substance). Reasoning about
Substances is pragmatic too. (However, since unbounded
things and homogeneous things are more likely to be treated
as Substance, properties of the whole are less likely to
be differentiated from properties of portions, because something
unbounded is not seen as a whole, and because something
homogeneous does not have salient parts.)
--And.
Nick:
> OK, now let me undermine my position
>
> When I say the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is playing, who do I mean?
> (We're talking English now.)
>
> Obviously not the second tuba player playing the kazoo. Obviously not a
> couple of wind players busking in their spare time
>
> Obviously not just the string players; when that happens, we say "the
> string section of the MSO", not "the MSO"
>
> In fact we say the MSO is playing for a culture-specific set of
> criteria, bound up with the history of the orchestra. Basically, if a
> superset of what would count as an orchestra in 1750 is onstage, with
> maybe one or two bits missing, you'll call it the orchestra. So you
> have to have some strings and some winds. The rest is optional
>
> Lojban can't get into these culture-specific criteria for every single
> {bende}. So it treats {bende} as a lojbanmass. Strictly speaking, the
> guy with the kazoo *is* the lojbanmass of the MSO. It takes pragmatics
> to go from there to "at least a Haydn-size orchestra, plus or minus an
> instrument." And because this is culture-specific criteria, this has to
> stay a pragmatic matter
I don't agree that we're dealing with lojbanmass *rather than*
Collective here. (IMO, Collective is a variety of lojbanmass.)
> The other thing lojbanmass gains in pragmatics is the fact that it is a
> bende --- a group of people that get together for a specific aim. When
> we say (in English) that the Beatles wrote the song, we mean not only
> that the lojbanmass of the Beatles did it, but that the lojbanmass is
> doing something consistent with the aims for with the Beatles were
> assembled, and with due authority to do so. If that obtains, we say
> 'the Beatles' for the lojbanmass {pisu'o loi prenrbitlzi} --- even if
> it's just Lennon/McCartney. If that is not the case, then in English we
> would insist on all the Beatles being involved -- {piro loi
> prenrbitlzi}. So if the Beatles write a song, it can be just
> Lennon/McCartney writing a song. But if I kill the Beatles, it has to
> be all of them
Still talking about Collective.
> .... or maybe not. This is murky, and not what we can or should solve
> now. The point is, that the semantics of a {bende} is complex enough
> (and that includes Nora's piano foreman}, that a lojbanmass is a good
> compromise. The nonveridicality thing was another such compromise for
> definiteness, although I think lamer
>
> So there's a definite place for lojbanmasses. In fact, a lot of what
> English would treat as collectives (to the extent it pays attention to
> the distinction at all) will turn out to be lojbanmasses, and it will
> be instructive to teach people the difference. But I think {jo'u} and
> {joi} are distinct for good reason, and we need to be able to reflect
> that distinction for bunches of stuff. Not even necessarily a gadri
> (although an extra LAhE will not kill you, for God's Sake). But at
> least something. In the current regime, there is nothing there to do
> it. Willing, in fact eager, to be corrected, but I'm not seeing it
>
> In conclusion: as a linguist, I luuurve Grice. I told my first year
> students that their pragmatics lecture was the most important lecture
> they would take with me. And a lot of my formalism is overcompensation
> for my mundane position, just as xod and I admitted to each other on
> the wiki once
I agree. A lesson of both linguistics and lojban is that if a formalist
doesn't love Grice, they end up trying to do the undoable -- to formalize
the unformalizable.
> But we gotta have our possibility for disambiguation. That's the Lojban
> way. And right now, I sure would like a clear way of saying
> "together"..
Hmm. I think Collective does that. "The crowd was loud" -- the people
in the crowd together are loud. It's compatible with everyone on the
crowd being individually loud, or nobody being individually loud,
or some but not all being individually loud.
> There may well be an utterly obvious gismu I'm missing; if there is,
> I'll consider retracting my support of {lu'oi}, in the interests of
> fundamentalism. Ball's back in whoever's court
I see no problem with {pa lo -collective be lo'i} in CLL Lojban.
You could even define a different predicate such that the collective
*only* has properties that its members don't have.
You could also do Prototype as {lo Prototype be lo'i}, or better,
{lo Prototype be lV ka}. I don't you could do Unique with a brivla,
but Unique is not in CLL, so can be ignored by Fundamentalism.
--And.