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From: pycyn@hidden.email Date: Tue, 7 Jan 2003 20:05:04 EST Subject: Re: [jboske] Monty's Unicorns, Fermat version To: lojbab@hidden.email Where does Fermat come in, by the way?I hope my remarks on external quantifiers didn't sound like I though every gadri always had one. I agree with & that some gadri never need them and that even {le} and {lo} don't need them before lambdas and other items that are inherently singular (or uncountable, if that sounds better). So &'s {tu'o} seems just right in the these cases -- so long as there is an implicit one there otherwise (which there often shouldn't be).The predicate that goes with a name is the device for disambiguating names: even "William Backhouse Astor IV" referred to at least two people (second cousins, to be sure). So the predicate is one that defines the class of things we are can talk about in a given situation -- out of which class we pick the named one (see why this is a quantifier -- as are "the" and the other edth word). It is not the haeceity of the one we want, but merely the class to which that one relevantly belongs for the present conversation.Worlds don't need time separately, since worlds are defined temporally (which is why subjunctive is so often a tense lexically). That is, every world is a node on a tree spread from past to future. Each such node has "an infinite" number of successor nodes, each differing from it in at least one proposition. But it has only one predecessor node. That is, time is line to the past and branching to the future and each possible word is on some trunk of this, all going back to at least the Big Bang (or rather just before, since it might not have happened or happened later -- or earlier, so we go back further still). We can only really make sense of ctfs that share a past with our own -- up to a crucial point (defined by the "if" clause, typically). which is why "If Socrates were a 17th Century Irish washerwoman" is so hard: it is on a different trunk altogether (or at least a branch that split off early in the -5th century, before our Socrates was born), so we don't know enough about the situation (what would 17th Century Ireland be like without there having been Socrates before, say). To be sure, there are worlds along that path that come to be almost exactly like ours, but the way they get to be has to be so different from the way ours came to be, that it is hard to imagine what generalizations to apply.
-- 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