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Nick:
> wrt to the first two answers:
>
> X:
> >>I emphasise that an entity can be a substance with respect to one
> >>property, and an individual with respect to another. If I eat a kiwi
> >>fruit, I'm eating it as a substance
>
> >I'm not sure that's right. If you're eating _a_ kiwi fruit, then
> >you're eating it as an individual. If you are eating kiwi fruit,
> >then you're eating substance. In fact you may be describing
> >the very same situation, but the descriptions are different (and
> >not equivalent)
>
> When I eat a kiwi fruit, I also eat every possible portion of the
> kiwi fruit. That meets the definition of substance. Not every
> possible portion of the kiwi fruit is a kiwi fruit, so it fails the
> definition of substance there. But as you agreed,
> individual/substance depends on the property
>
> I would say two things. First, what I'm eating is an individual wrt
> {ka ce'u grutrxaktinidio}, but a substance wrt {ka citka ce'u}. I eat
> substances --- which, in another frame of reference, may be
> individuals instead
I find myself unhappy with the way you distinguish substance and
individual. Consider a person who has been X-rayed throughout.
Is this {su'o lo se x-ray(-throughout)} or {pi su'o loi se x-ray(-throughout)}?
Certainly the latter is not wrong, but you would
seem to be saying that the former is wrong, yet we can quite
clearly conceptualize the referent as countable.
Furthermore, very many properties will apply to some parts but
not to all parts or to no parts. Are they substance or individual?
What about a property like "wax 2-inch-square-cube", which is
a conjunction of one property that applies to no part but the
largest (the whole) and another property that applies to every
part?
All in all, I think your dissertation on individuals, collectives
and substances was excellent as an explication of some key semantic
notions, but it is unworkably wrong to use your distinctions
to differentiate among the 3 lojban types. I think your account
of collective is okay, but for individual and substance the
workable and better definitions would be to revert to countability
as the differentiating criterion.
> Second, when you eat it, you're therefore forcing a type shift: {mi
> citka piro loi pa lo grutrxaktinidio}. But of course, we need not
> make that overt: we know that the {se citka} is a substance qua {se
> citka}, but when we come to naming it, we can name it as an
> individual wrt the other property. A lot of this logic machinery will
> be behind the scenes. So it must remain legal to say {mi citka lo
> grutrxaktinidio}
>
> Nonetheless, it is crucial that {mi citka piro loi pa lo
> grutrxaktinidio} is true, and that we retieve that expansion as an
> explanation of {mi citka lo grutrxaktinidio}
>
> And if you want to say that kiwi fruit are underlyingly individuals,
> how you do distinguish eating a kiwi fruit from just eating kiwi
> fruit, the substance? In the latter case, {mi citka piro loi tu'o
> grutrxaktinidio} = {mi citka piro loi su'opa lo grutrxaktinidio}
If "x eats y" entails "x eats every part of y", y can be expressed
by an individual-expression.
> &:
>
> >I think an individual can be treated as a collective of one, and
> >not as a fundamentally distinct type. Hence in 3rd ExSol:
>
> >le su'o remna
> >le pa remna
> >le za'u remna
>
> >and le tu'o remna for substance
>
> You're doing an Occam here. I think it premature, especially since SL
> (and I do feel warranted in saying this) differentiates individuals
> (collectives of one) from collectives of more than one, by giving the
> former {lo} and the latter {loi}
{loi} is the collective of all broda, and if there is only one broda
then it is a collective of one. {lei broda} is {lei su'o broda}
not {lei za'u broda}: it just means that however many members of
lei broda there are, the property attributed to it applies to
all members together, not to each member separately.
So loi is a collective of su'o, not of za'u. As for lo, lo is not
a collective of one -- lo has no independent meaning, and lo broda
certainly does not mean "pa broda".
> Psychological realism would also say Occam isn't enough of a
> criterion to conflate: if we don't think of individuals the same way
> we think of collectives, why describe them the same way?
I think the conflation is exactly right. Sometimes we think of
su'omei in general and sometimes we think more specifically of
pamei and za'umei. English doesn't have a grammaticized way of
saying "su'omei", but sometimes singulars are interpreted as
"su'omei" and sometimes plurals are.
--And.