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And wants vei mo'e tu'o lo namcu ve'o lo broda to be the substance.My god, that's ugly,and I have no idea what it means at all. Sorry, I'll need to come back to it.
And's main contention is that talk of the substance makes nonsensical any outer quantifier.
We have two ways to non-quantify things in Lojban already. Both intensional: Prototype and Kind.
And, give me some representative statements about substance that are not about bits of substance, and we'll see if they're not all Kinds or Prototypes.
Water is a liquid: Prototype. I like Water: Kind (or Intension, anyway.) Water got into my boots: Bit of substance (pisu'o djacu)Link said something about substance as distinct from bits of substance too, in his paper --- where he did something like my ontology, but in the other direction and much more cogently: he started with atoms, then the goo of them, then the goo-join and the collective-join of them, and built up a universe. And I think what he said was they were all nominal masses (= kinds, I think.) But I'll check tomorrow.
Aside:I think And is still wrong about it being impossible to count bits of substance: you *can* count them, if the ve memzilfendi is constrained (Eastern Hemisphere vs Western Hemisphere water --- cut by the Greenwich Meridian.) Just as you can count real numbers if you consider only the natural ones -- or a mapping of natural to real ones. So countable bits of substance exist as a subset of all bits of substance, and are analogous to Natural being a subset of Real numbers. Writing down natural numbers and saying you're counting real numbers is no less true than picking out bisections and trisections of space and saying you're counting spaces. Of course you are. And there will be spaces you miss, just as there will be real numbers you miss.
I think right now numbers are atomic (qua platonic ideals), and division is not a legitimate instantiation of ve memzilfendi. But even if I'm wrong, we can think of a number as being the substance of all smaller numbers that add up to it. That is one way to think about a number; it's just a nightmarishly spaced out one. :-)
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