[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
Nick:
> --- In jboske@yahoogroups.com, "And Rosta" <a.rosta@l...> wrote:
>
> > My answer to that is that I can say {da poi -is-Nick} or {da poi
> > -is-gold} (is that which is Nick, is that which is gold), where
> > da is a bit of spacetime -- what I take to be an extensional thing
> > {da poi -is-xodium} would yield false
>
> > What I'm talking about is an extensional thing that is simply a
> > realization of a Kind. So yes, the quantification is the same,
> > but one claims a world-specific existence and the other doesn't
>
> I don't get you. Sherlock Holmes also yields false in {da poi
> -is-Sherlock} in this world. So, what, we've got intensions that
> correspond to existences, and intensions that don't?
No. We have the Kinds, Mr Nick, Mr Sherlock, Mr Gold, Mr Xodium.
And we have the predicates "is that portion of the world that
manifests Mr Nick/Sherlock/Gold/Xodium, such that the remainder
does not manifest it". Those predicates have the same countability
properties as Kinds, but they make world-specific existential
claims. A Kind exists in every world it is manifested in, but
the manifestation exists in only its own world.
Having thought about it a bit more, I'm not sure if English
makes this distinction, but I think Lojban should be able to.
BTW, in case it's not clear, the reason why the distinction
doesn't really apply to things like Mr Single Dog is that
its manifestation lacks the property of being a single
dog: instead it is a very scattered collective of dogs.
--And.