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xod: > On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, And Rosta wrote: > > > xod: > > > On Fri, 8 Aug 2003, And Rosta wrote: > > > > 3. It is arguably correct that the cardinality of the mass of all > > Five(s) > > > > is tu'o rather than pa. Since we can't conceive of what re li mu would > > > > be like, we can't know that there is exactly pa li mu. > > > > > > We know that we have one Five. And we can show that every other > > > Five is identical. So we've proven that there is only one Five. > > > > No we haven't. We've shown that there isn't more than Five. But that > > doesn't prove that it is countable, since for uncountables you can > > also prove that there isn't more than one of them. > > I'm sure that whatever "uncountable" you offer as an example will be > counted by me as unity. You yourself had proposed {lVi re brick}, "collective of two bricks", {lVi tu'o brick}, "mass of uncountable brick", so presumably you recognize the difference between brick and one brick. > > > This is not trivial. The same type of proof can prove that there are only > > > two integers between 0.1 and 2.1, a case that does not result in any > > > answer which one is tempted to substitute tu'o. > > > > I don't dispute that there is one integer between 4.1 and 5.1. I fully > > accept that integers are countable. But I am disputing whether fives are > > countable. > > > > Likewise, I accept that people are countable, but dispute that xod is, > > I accept that chemical elements are countable, but dispute that oxygen > > is, and I accept that we can count kinds of Goo but dispute that we can > > count a single kind of Goo. > > There's an old joke about how programmers start counting not at 1, but at > 0. Apparently you start at 2. I'm not sure that the rest of us share that > peculiarity. I start counting at one, but only for things I'm sure can be counted. For that, I need to know what re broda would look like and how it differs from pa broda. --And.