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On 9/27/06, John E. Clifford <clifford-j@hidden.email> wrote:
--- In jboske@yahoogroups.com, "Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@...> wrote:
>
> I'm not sure how the purport of a sentence could be that one of the
> referring expressions used (as opposed to mentioned) in the sentence
> have no referent.
(no da me lo broda} or even {no da du lo broda)
OK.
Unless {no da} is interpreted as being implicitly restricted (i.e as
{no da [poi ...]) then I would take those sentences to be uninterpretable
or necessarily false.
People don't usually utter uninterpretable or necessarily false sentences,
so in ordinary circumstances if someone utters such a sentence they
will be understood as having some unexpressed restriction in mind.
> > > Model_0: Does not contain p in its theory. > > > Model_1: Includes p and turns out to be inconsistent, so the model > > is ditched. > > > Model_2: Includes the theory of Model_0 plus ~p. The examination of > > Model_1 > > > was helpful to determine that Model_0 could be expanded to Model_2. > > > > "Had to be expanded" is perhaps more to the point. A situation > > ultimately must contain all the logically entailled + claims. But > > that is not entirely relevant here. > > p could be a new proposed axiom rather than just a theorem of the theory. > If it was logically entailed by the truths of Model_0, it was as you say, > already in Model_0. The fact that the reductio works ed showed tht it was.
What if p makes reference to some new object not included in the domain of Model_0?
> When it comes to ordinary discourse, seen as a process of model > building, most new sentences will be incorporated as new axioms since > what already follows from already extant axioms are usually trivialities > that noone would bother uttering. The point is, as usual, that we can sometimes add these new axioms without having to expand the domain, even though the addition appears to contain a referring expression.
And from my point of view, Lojban sentences that appear to contain a referring expression always do in fact contain a referring expression (or else are uninterpretable).
I gather that you think that the problem only arises when there are explicit quantifiers involved, which is a useful way to deal with the deep structure.
Basically yes.
But ordinary languages seem to create these contrasts without making the the quantifiers explicit and I think Lojban should be able to do this as well-- while still keeping -- and making explcit -- the distinction betweeen the two readings. Note that the official line does just that; the problem being only that what that official pattern points to does not seem to be the right sort of thing.
Yes, the official (CLL) line has {lo broda} = {su'o lo broda}. That's
why I don't like implicit quantifiers.
Still, we can mark the difference and worry about what is actually going on later. The interesting fact is that the two quantified forms are not interchangable even when there is only one unicorn in the domain. I can want a unicorn (narrow reading) other than the unicorn there happens to be -- to deny this flies in the face of what we all do constantly.
From my perspective, "a unicorn other than the unicorn there
happens to be" will have a referent too, if expressed with a referring
term. (Of course you could always say something like
{ko'a goi lo pa pavyseljirna zo'u mi djica lo du'u su'o da pavyseljirna
gi'e na du ko'a}, but then there is no reference to a unicorn other than
the only unicorn.)
> One can claim that someone wants it or that someone doesn't > want it, but it makes no sense to distinguish "a particular one of them > is such that the person wants it" from "the person wants just any one > of them". Sure, if you are talking about wanting *it,* but wanting a unicorn is not the same as wanting it, even if it is the only unicorn there is.
You may not like this usage of English "it", but: A: I want something. B: What is it that you want? A: A unicorn. (later) B: Did you get it? A: What? B: What you wanted, a unicorn. A: No, I didn't get it yet. sounds perfectly normal English to me, even with the "any unicorn" sense.
> Our > disagreement is about whether or not we can have a model where > a single thing is the referent of an expression with that single thing > having a generic or type interpretation. In fact, we haven't talked about this at all for some time, and not very precisely even earlier. If this is what you think the arguemnt is about, then you really need to explain what a type or a generic interpretation of a thing is.
I thought that's what I have been doing.
{lo broda} refers to brodas, as you
kept insisting a few threads ago, to the several of them (how many,
which ones, even whether existent or not, not specified),
Not "the several of them". It may be the one and only too. Number is not specified in any way.
not to some one thing of which these were parts or some such relation. Has all this changed? Why? And why would we want this unknown object in Lojban?
I want it because it makes the language expressive and easy to use, without losing its logicality. mu'o mi'e xorxes