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lo/le definition



Nora observes that since the ultimate definition of lo broda and le broda pertains to things that fill the x1 of broda, and since for various broda, the x1 place is expressed as individuals, sets, masses, and what have you, then le/lo manifestly MUST be ambiguous amongst those meanings, regardless of the specified default quantifiers and what people have deduced from the assignment of such quantifiers.

What this does to the supposed equivalence of lo broda and da poi broda, I leave to someone else, since da poi ke'a broda implicitly says that da also has to have the implicit quantification implied by the x1 of broda.

(In writing this, I think I now remember where the phrase "default quantifier" came from, though I need to check. In normal quantificational logic, the variables would all be quantified in the prenex. We are taking a shortcut by not using a prenex; the default quantifiers are therefore an attempt to set up rules to establish what the prenex would be if it were explicit. I believe that it was found that this is an intractable problem, but that general defaults could be assumed, with the option of being explicit in the prenex if necessary. This implies that when a sumti need not be quantified in the prenex in order to be well-formed notationally, it does not need a default quantifier. Thus a system of logic that does not use quantifiers, or that uses different defaults, is perfectly acceptable under loglan/lojban, meeting And's needs to talk about things using a different logic than "John's conservative, everything-quantified ..." version.)

lojbab

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lojbab                                             lojbab@hidden.email
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org