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On Thu, 7 Aug 2003, John Cowan wrote: > seqram2 scripsit: > > > Instead of saying that Mr. Bird is "sometimes" carnivore and sometimes > > herbivore, sometimes male and sometimes female, it would seem to me > > that what makes for a "prototype" are exactly those characteristics > > which *are* constant across "almost all" instances of the critter. So > > Mr. Bird has no specific size (though its size is limited to between > > an inch or so and 10-odd feet), nor a gender, nor a diet, but does > > have feathers, a beak, two wings, is warm-blooded, etc. > > You are talking about lo'e cipni (in the non-Jorge sense of lo'e), which is > indeed "thin" in the sense of having only those properties shared by all, > or at least all typical, birds. Mr. Bird is a different thing: he is the > One Bird of whom all individual birds are avatars. Whether English (or other > SAE languages) take Mr. X or individual Xes to be more important > depends on X: for birds, it's the individual bird most of > the time, but for the _New York Times_ it's Mr. Times that counts, not > a particular copy/individual/avatar. But when we think of all those newspapers as being Mr. Times, it's ONLY because we are deliberately ignoring the individual differences. In that sense, we only invoke Mr. Times when we seek the Prototype (or Prototype Instance) that is related to CLL-lo'e. The difference between Prototype and Prototype Instance is that statements about the former are definitional, while statements about the latter are not. However, definitional statements can (and should?) be made using "ro". And we only need the Prototype Instance when we seek interchangeable members, which is probably the only use for lo. -- The Pentagon group believed it had a visionary strategy that would transform Iraq into an ally of Israel, remove a potential threat to the Persian Gulf oil trade and encircle Iran with U.S. friends and allies...