WikiDiscuss

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wrote:

>
> pc:
> > > Yes, I do mean negation transparency. I
> take
> > > these to be materially equivalent:
> > >
> > > naku lo rozgu cu xunre
> > > lo rozgu naku cu xunre
> > >
> > > "It is not the case that roses are red."
> > > "As for roses, it is not the case that they
> are
> > > red."
> >
> > I know you do and I am still waiting for an
> > explanation of how this is going to work.
>
> I don't know what kind of further explanation
> you
> expect. Why wouldn't it work?
>
> > The
> > first means that is false that some
> (particular,
> > I would think) roses are red — all of them.
> > That could be because there are no roses or
> > because there are no roses picked out by the
> > expression or because there are but not all
> of
> > them are are red — but some of them might
> be.
> > The second says that there are roses picked
> out
> > by the expression and all of them are
> non-red.
> > Note that only one subcase covered by the
> first
> > is covered by the second, hardly an
> equivalence.
>
> That's the case if you take {lo rozgu} to be
> {ro lo rozgu}, a quantified term. But I don't.
> For me it's a constant that refers to roses.

Reference is to particulars. Now, if you want
generality, you have two choices — one not
officially available in Lojban. You can use
quantifiers — and whichever one you pick will
generate the problems mentioned above — or you
can use some modal notion like "generally" or
"usually" or "typically." Lojban doesn't have
those but clearly needs them. As modal notions
they do take one out of the real world into
idealized ones of some sort — but then, in that
world, {lo rozgu} picks out some roses, all of
which or some of which are or are not red and on
that hinges the truth about {lo rozgu}. I note
in passing that your second definition of {lo}
makes it not only particular roses but specific
ones, "the obvious ones in the context" (assuming
that {zo'e} is meaningful and a referring
expression in a definition context). Your first
definition (otherwise generally better) contains
the unexplained "generic reference," for which I
cannot find a plausible interpretation still
after all these years (quantifiers or reference
to a genus or species having both been rejected).
The basic problem is that a claim, to be
meaningful, has to have some way of verifying it,
at least in principle. How would you verify {lo
rozgu cu xunre}? If nom particular roses are
relevant then it seems impossible to do, if some
are then the question is how many of them are
needed to show the claim true (or how are they
distributed, which is an only slightly more
complex case). You can say that quantifiers
don't count, but in the real world they almost
always do.

> > I would not put up a wiki page — which has a
> > habit of being permanent — until I was
> > reasonably confident of what I had.
>
> Wiki pages are modifiable, and if you want to
> erase the
> whole thing at some point you can.

Obviously true, but the iorignals tend to get
saved and used later.

> > And, of
> > course, I would not put up my page without
> > criticizing your — which means that der
> > Gruppenfuehrer will erase my page immediately
> he
> > notices it
>
> I doubt that very much. You are very welcome to
> criticize
> mine all you please.

I have been explicitly told not too on pain of
being excluded from all sites under dGF's control
-- which, alas, is virtually everything having to
do with Lojban.

> >(he has threatened this several times
> > and has usually followed through on his
> threats).
>
> Most of his complaints as I remember have been
> about form
> rather than content, things like excessive
> quoting and such.
> I doubt very much he would censor anything you
> write about
> the language.

As I said....

> > So there is not much of a point to that
> exercise.
>
> OK, but don't expect me to keep all your
> proposals with
> their variations in mind if there isn't a place
> where I
> can check what they were with reasonable
> accessibility.
>
> > Well, it is back in the archives of the gadri
> > thread somewhere. I can try to fish it out,
> but
> > — on the basis of the response the last time
> --
> > I doubt that anyone but you will look at it.
>
> And if you find it and just post it here, it
> will be lost
> when we need to check again next month. A wiki
> page is much
> more convenient for this, because then you can
> just direct
> me to go look there. And if someone else
> suddenly became
> interested, now or three months from now, they
> wouldn't
> have to wade through hundreds of posts to find
> it.

I think that was the point of the mythical
elephant, but I'll see what I can do.