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>>> lojbab@hidden.email 01/08/03 04:02pm >>>
#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.
But this does not resolve the only unresolved issue, which is whether
"lo blanu" means just "something that is blue" or whether it means "something
that is singulary countably blue". That is, does {lo} force a countable
interpretation on the predicate? I guess Nora would say No.
#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.)
Yes -- I prefer this. If I don't use a lexical quantifier before the gadri (or
similar) then I am not expressing a logical quantifier. If the resulting expression
strikes the hearer as logically incoherent or inappropriate to the context, then
the hearer can form an interpretation that adds in a logical quantifier to what
was actually said.
--And.