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Let me try and sum up the outstanding gadri issues as I see them. (This is a draft of the letter I will eventually have to send out to the BPFK. Remember that?)
1. loiLojbanmass conflates individuals, collectives (tuples of entities), and substances (uncountable agglomerations of entities or sections thereof.) This is in fact by founder design (which leads me, yet again, to despise the founders). Distinguishing between these three subsenses seems to me laudibly meritorious --- "can you or can you not in Lojban say "together" or "separately"; but quantification seems only partially a way of doing it.
A substance is loi tu'o brodaIndividuals, collectives, and substances of collectives are all loi tu'o ro broda I think the collective vs. substance of collective conflation is bogus, because a substance of collective can *still* be phrased as loi tu'o broda; and such second step abstractions are pragmatically more like loi tu'o loi ro broda, if you're going to put quantifiers in there. (Yes, that's grammatical.)
But I'm tired of these somersaults. Since Lojban already distinguishes between joi and jo'u, I'm back to thinking we should get a separate LAhE and be done with it for collective.
I note in passing that the gismu definitions do treat sets as n-tuples, just as Bob's addled recollection leads me to believe. (No, I don't like what he did. Because I'm stuck trying to clear up the mess. And I don't give a fuck if the mess is originally James Brown's.) Why else use sets in the gismu definitions where he did?
It is distressingly clear that Lojban is shortchanged of any tools to distinguish between collectives and substances, and I'll settle even for gismu at this stage.
Bob says the gismu for collectives might be kampu, The x2 of kampu is... a set! Ergo, Bob thinks of sets as collectives/tuples. Thanks a bunch.
2. lo'eThe candidate senses are: Statistical (e.g. mode), Prototype (mental definition), and Unique. The founders (addled once more) seem to have preferred Prototype (which matches stereotype), I've retracted Statistical, and And has retracted Unique (apparently), so this is resolved.
A secondary issue is whether anything inherited can be predicated of lo'e: do you study or draw lo'e cinfo, or is that only meaningful as a definitional trait? To keep our sanity, the latter.
3. UniqueAnd has fumbled this badly, as he will himself admit, but people are slowly starting to see the point to this construct. It was begotten of kludgery, and pressed into service to solve everything, but it is handy. It is a generic like the prototype. making an individual of a population by regarding the actual individuals of the population instantiations of the one underlying individual.
By speaking of Lions that are all underlyingly the same lion, And had made his interlocutors dispute his sanity. Speaking of Mondays, or the New York Times --- things we are used to abstracting an underlying individual out of instances --- would have helped him rather more. The Unique is an individuated version of the Kind (as in "I own that kind of car", treating all Porsches as the one thing), which treats the population as a single entity. As such, it corresponds to many an English use of the generic.
This looks headed for its own LAhE. 4. Intensional article We may or may not need one.If propositionalism rules the land, we won't need one for wanting, needing, or seeking. mi djica tu'a lo broda, mi nitcu tu'a lo broda, and mi sisku leka broda already mean exactly what we want. Because they have prenexes by default on the inner predication.
The problem arises with imagination preds, although it laps at the others as well. If the quantification is limited to this world (so that, for all {x|broda(x)}, the Any-x can be paraphrased as x1 .a x2 .a x3... , just as ro lo broda can be paraphrased as x1 .e x2 .e x3... and piro loi broda as x1 joi x2 joi x3... --- and hopefully, piro lu'oi broda as x1 jo'u x2 jo'u x3...),
then wanting a doctor can be interpreted as wanting one of the 5 zillion doctors practicing today on this planet. Same with needing. And seeking \x:doctor(x) can range over the set of all doctors practicing today on the planet.
But when you include Dr Quinn Medicine Woman among your doctors, you're ranging beyond this planet. You're getting into imaginary doctors. You don't want a made-up doctor when you want one, need one, or seek one. Whatever the 'objective' existence of what you put into those preds, you the speaker do believe that a referent exists in this world. Usually. So, by Gricean default (and using the resources of Classical Lojban),
mi djica tu'a lo mikce means mi djica lenu le ca'a munje su'o da poi mikce zi'e poi se vasru le ca'a munje zo'u: mi penmi da Usually, I say, Because we do also have exchanges like this: "I want a doctor" "Yeah, and I want a gold toilet, but it ain't gonna happen."Since people can want the impossible, there is the possibility that you can actually be saying
mi djica lenu su'o de poi munje zi'e po'u na'ebo le ca'a munje su'o da poi mikce zi'e poi se vasru de zo'u: mi penmi daThat's dispreferred for wanting, needing, seeking. But for depicting it's entirely possible, and for imagining it's almost mandatory.
When you depict a mermaid, you know that she's not in this world, but in a made-up world. So you can't say
mi te pixra lo fipni'u because that's tied up with the initial prenex, so it comes out as su'o da poi fipni'u zo'u: mi te pixra da which means su'o da poi fipni'u zi'e poi se vasru leca'a munje zo'u: mi te pixra daEven if we had propositionalism here (and it would not kill us), we'd still be defaulting to quantification in this world:
mi te pixra lenu su'o da poi fipni'u zi'e poi se vasru le ca'a munje zo'u: da co'e mi te pixra le ka ce'u noi se vasru le ca'a munje cu fipni'u But when we know we're imagining stuff, we can go to imaginary worlds: mi te pixra lenu su'o de poi munje ku'o su'o da poi fipni'u zi'e poi se vasru de zo'u: da co'e mi te pixra le ka su'o de poi munje zo'u ce'u noi se vasru de cu fipni'uMaybe this kind of propositionalistic solution could make it a pragmatic default of the predicates involved that they leave the world of the quantification open --- whereas wanting/needing/seeking default to this world.
And with that, we'd have a solution. It would be butt ugly, but we could live with it.
da'i and ka'e may do things with imaginary worlds that would have to be worked out, and that may end up being conscripted in this story.
There are a couple of outs.The Lojbanmass will do for wanting/needing/seeking, at a pinch, because it includes in its denotation the Any-x: mi nitcu loi mikce is true of {x1 .a x2 .a x3...}. It's no good once you go outside of the real world into imaginaries, though. So it doesn't help with imagining or depicting.
When you draw a doctor, you could be said to be drawing a depiction of the prototype in your mind. Now, the Cowan solution to the problem of inheritance, which And has accepted, is that you can't make secondary claims of prototypes, only generic claims: you can't say {mi kavbu lo'e cinfo}. You also can't say, for that reason, {mi te pixra lo'e cinfo}, because that would make the lion defined as something you draw. But you can claim {mi te pixra la'e lo'e cinfo}
Another alternative is the Unique: the Unique is a population-based generic, and abstracts away differences between the individuals in the population. So the picture becomes a picture of lion-dom.
If we accept that le broda need not have a referent in this world (so we can speak of {le fipni'u} or {le xavlerfu gismu} meaningfully}, then {le} is already non-commital as to whether its referent exists in this world or not, by virtue of its nonveridicality. What would serve as an intensional article then would be a counterpart to {le}, with no specificity. And would invent a new paradigm of gadri; I would be rather happier with a UI kludge.
And says that Unique is not veridical either. It is true that in English we would say "Lions live in Africa" and "Elves live in Mordor". But I think the assumption that prototypes and Uniques in Lojban are non-veridical is rash.
The intensional reference ranges over individuals, lojbanmasses, and sets. Therefore a new gadrow (to use And's terminology) for the intensional is ill-judged: there cannot be just one intensional article. It will be either a whole suite, or the intensional shall be done by other means. For obvious reasons, I prefer the other means. These include both propositionalism and continued kludges involving ka...ce'u, possibly incorporating something like ka'ai.
### ki egeire arga ta sthqia ta qlimmena;#Nick Nicholas, French/Italian san ahdoni pou se nuxtia anoijiata # University of Melbourne thn wra pou kelahda epnixth, wimena! # nickn@hidden.email stis murwdies kai st' anqismena bata.# http://www.opoudjis.net-- N. Kazantzakhs, Tertsines: Xristos#