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On Mon, 4 Aug 2003, Jorge Llambías wrote:
>
> la xod cusku di'e
>
> > (Using loi'a to denote collectives) if I said loi'a prenu cu cadzu, that
> > doesn't make sense, because walking is not an emergent property of
> > pluralities of humans.
>
> There are properties that are common to each/some of the members and
> to the group. I don't see a problem with a group of people walking.
> If we say "the group walked from the bus to the museum", that would
> still be true even if one of the members of the group was a child
> carried in arms by a parent, for example. It would not be the case
> however that each member of the group walked. Furthemore, if the group
> walked as a group, it would be misleading to insist on the
> distributivity. If each member is walking in a different direction, it
> does not make sense to say that the group is walking as a group, but
> if it is walking as a group, it is more informative to say so and not
> just say that each member is walking.
I suppose you're correct. Perhaps I should have used a better example,
like chewing, perhaps.
The child example might be misleading, though -- it is a numerical
convention of ours to use the idea of a group to refer to the high
majority of its members, not requiring 100% compliance. I don't think that
habit should be construed to reflect interesting facts about the nature of
emergent properties. One child being carried in a crowd of a dozen seems
to be different in quality from the 3 piano carriers. Individuals can and
do walk, they can't carry pianoes. Individuals can be noisy, but it's a
different quality of noise than that emitted by a crowd. There is room for
wiggling here, but we should be clear about the underlying principles.
> > If I said loi'a prenu cu cladu, it means that the
> > crowd is noisy in the way that crowds are noisy, but not in the way that
> > individuals are noisy.
>
> Right. And I believe that the collective is the more common
> interpretation of "those people are being very noisy".
>
> > su'o prenu cu cladu is a different statement. So I
> > can make a statement about a plurality which is a different statement if
> > applied to the same plurality marked as a collective.
>
> I think you and I agree. We just have different ideas about
> which of the two situations is more basic/frequent.
Is this my western culture bias? I find it hard to consider constituent
individuals as less basic than the groups they can form at times.
> > Different point: Pluralities use the gadri for individuals because each
> > thing is taken as an individual; not because it makes any sense to speak
> > of a plurality of one. A collective of one is equally meaningless.
>
> Hopefully we both agree that {le pa broda} and {lei pa broda} are
> equivalent ways of refering to an individual, given that a single
> individual taken "one at a time" is equivalent to a single individual
> taken "together".
Except I think the latter form is at best unhelpful and misleading (Grice.
Grice.), and at worst an interesting koan like zi'o crino -- given that I
think loi'a should be used to draw the reader's attention to emergent
properties, and no properties emerge from a collective with only one
member.
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