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At 11:15 PM 1/4/03 +0000, And Rosta wrote:
> >You are being perversely confusing here
> >
> >You drink {pisu'o loi djacu} = part of the mass of water
> >You do not drink every part of the mass of water
> >
> >If you drink the mass of water, then you probably drink every part
> >of it
>
> Why? In English, if I drink a glass of water, I do not guarantee that
> every molecule of hydrogen dioxide has moved from the glass to my gullet
You need to understand what pragmatics is, which we personify as
Grice. I would have hoped that in these discussions we could take it
for granted that we all understand this.
If you drink a glass of water, then there is none left once you
have drunk it. What qualifies as 'none left' is determined by
ordinary criteria of relevance.
Correct, but LOGIC is orthogonal to pragmatics. When one is being hyperlogical, one is ignoring pragmatics. All means ALL, not almost all. This is why I introduced da'a (which BTW I think should be used instead of me'iro, which flashed by my screen in the last couple of days in some context). People including logician considered a superlative to mean "more than ro" and this is logically impossible since nothing is more broda than itself. Pragmatics (and all natural language) understands this, but it is logically wrong.
Invoking Whorf, if I say that noda poi jelca is in the drum, then that really means NOda, and lighting a match should be safe.
> >But if you touch the mass of water, then you probably > >touch just part of it. Likewise, if I eat Nick then I probably eat > >(almost) every part of him, > > If I eat the chicken, I probably leave the bones behind. If I were > cannibalistic, I would probably do the same with Nick The point is that it is a predicate-specific property how much of the sumti is affected. For some predicates the amount affected is "approximately all relevant bits".
Predicate logic demands that any "predicate-specific properties" be handled by the place structures, so as to be transparent at the meta level that the logic and grammar are operating. An operation on a predicate should work the same way regardless of what the predicate means.
> >Your reasoning is based on (a) deliberately failing to distinguish
> >the mass from part of the mass, and (b) taking {pi ro} to mean
> >"every part of", which we have already agreed to be error
>
> Why? If it doesn't mean every, then use pida'a
Does pimu mean "1 part in every 2 of", or "a half of"?
In base ten it means ".5 of" which is either of those (I'm not sure I see the difference).
lojbab -- lojbab lojbab@hidden.email Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc. 2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273 Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org