WikiDiscuss

F:But the disanalogy is stronger-- one is the product of analysis, the other of synthesis, which require very different sorts of things. We know that the totality exists and have doubts about the stages in the one case; we jknow that the instances exist but have doubts about the totality in the other.

G: Te property of being a rabbit holds together the stages of individual rabbits, but it does not (or at least has not been shown to) hld together various rabbits into a new entity.

H: But I have no reason (that I know of or have been informed of) to think that all the men named John form a concrete entity, nor for that matter any other things which share a name or even a description. that they form a variety of *abstract* entities (in some sense of "form") I have no doubt (which is probably why I — trying my damnedest to be fair and make sense out of what you say — keep coming back to Mr. Rabbit as an abstract).

I:There are things (I'm not sure how concrete they are) that have intermittent existences — Poland springs to mind, but they are held together by quite a bit more than the name (history, culture, language, emotion, even a constitution in some cases — though not Poland's). I should not think that Mr. Rabbit — or Mr.anything else concrete would be such an intermediate case. (The official Christian view of the afterlife, bodily resurrection, is an interesting case, too.)

J: Maybe, but as noted, not as the sort of thing it seems to be.
K: Hey, a reasonably clear statement of why do this: it is simpler. Doing a way with quantifiers altogether and using only constants (it can be done) would be simpler still, it would seem. But there remains the problem of 1) explaining what the heck these constants mean and 2)working out the screamingly difficult connection between what are linguistically constants and what are logically quantified variables. Part of the point of Lojban, recall is that the logical operations are to be near the surface, not buried — at least in langue, even if not always in parole. Since we had a smoothly functioning device for doing this, why replace it with one that creates a mass of headaches by burying the logic away in references to mythic objects (which, it turns out, we cannot in fact refer to since every use of the supposed referring expression turns out to refer in fact to an instance for the practical semantic moves, e.g., finding out whether a sentence using the expression is true).

L: But the paradox disappears completely with quantification (one of the reasons for its development, in fact). {su'o pavyseljirna na zasti}

M: But why do you think that {lo ractu} old style would be used to say something about the class of rabbits or the collective of rabbits or whatever it is that you seem to think "rabbits" refers to in English/ {lo} makes a lousy tense marker, too, but that is not a reason to replace it; it is a reason to get a tense marker that does what is wanted. (Of coure, I tend to think that most of the kinds of thins you are talking about are malglicoisms in spades, but I am willing to think there may be a residue that need work: more gadri {le'e} and {lo'e}, which refer not to individuals but create a summary of claims about the critters of the appropriate sort: "rabbits," if it is not just {lo'e ractu}, is clearly in the same area. Note that it does not refer to some mythic individual — or to any describable combination of reals ones and so is not quantifiable, either in itself nor as a base for generalization. I forget what the gadri page says about this.)
If what you say about the {lo} examples — I have to admit I stopped at {... nitcu lo ...}, then the gadri page is in worse shape than even I thought, since, by your descripotion, it gives as exemplary cases of {lo} things that are not (clearly, generally agreed) cases of {lo} at all.

Byt the way, somehwere earlier you called {tu'a lo ractu} vague. It is, of course, since it omits information about what I want/need/etc. for or what I dreamed about it and so on. But this is marked less vague than {lo ractu} in your usage, which also omits all that information (and does not even indicate that it may be significant) but plunks us down with something that is not even a rabbit (or is only in an indirect sort of way).

Jorge Llambías <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:

pc:
> I think my basic problem here is that you are trying to explain a synthetic
> category (like a collective or so) by analogy with an analytic category like
> a slicew or stage.

F:The analogy is kind:instance::individual:stage
so the kind is analogous to the individual and the
instance to the stage.

> with analytic categories you can fall back on the
> original object being analysed to guarantee and at least partially explain
> what holds the pieces together, with a synthetic category we have to provide
> that glue explicitly and this has not been done.

G:The glue is the property in question. lo ka ractu is the
property that all the instances of lo ractu have in common.

> Why should I (starting from
> where I am) see all these individuals (rabbits in this case) as being
> instances of something else concrete.

H:Because they share a common name/description?

> This is not even like seeing all
> nature as One or even treating an ecosystem as an entity, for what we are
> dealing with has no "natural" cohesion. What is needed then is a convincing
> artificial one and that isn't here yet.

I offer their description, "ractu", or the property they all share,
{lo ka ractu}.

> (This is not to say that, starting
> from a different perceptual framework — a Madhyamika Buddhis, say — I
> wouldn't find this natural as well, though I am not sure that they actually
> would).
>
> C: Assuming that {la ract} is meant to be a name for an ordinary thing — a
> guy called Bunny, for example — then more than a stage has to exist for it
> to exist. The stage has to fit into a continuous series of contiguous stages
> satisfying an array of further condition.

I:Intermittent existence is ruled out even in principle, by definition?
{da ru'inai zasti} is false by definition?

> Otherwise, Bunny falls into some
> category like delusions or illusions or ...

J:If it has at least one stage that exists, I bet it has to exist.

> Mr. Rabbit on the other hand seems to be exactly nothing other than a bunch
> of "instances" with no yet explained further conditions. And as such it
> seems pointless, given that we have the instances. So, in addition to the
> glue, we need a raison d'etre for this notion.

K:The glue is that the instances share a description, the raison
d'etre is simplicity in use (constants are much easier to handle than
quantified terms).

> D: Thse, of course, raise the old paradox of how to say of something that
> does not exist that it does not exist. I don't see that Mr. Unicorn helps
> here at all (though short-scope {lo} would if we take "imaginary" to be
> world-creating — which we should, for a variety of other reasons as well).

L:In any case, the paradox is neither more nor less paradoxical for
Mr. Unicorn than for Ms. Poppins.

> E: Frinstance? Lojban is almost always going to seem cumbersome to speakers
> of natural language because it has a built in precising mechanism and has not
> yet developed good conventions for work-arounds. I would assume that people
> who use tha language a lot (a class which is almost coextensive with you)
> have begun to develop those things. But that is very different from changing
> the basics of the language, which is what new {lo} seems to do.
> What exactly is the advantage of making {lo ractu} a constant, when the
> phenomena being described involve variable references? As for the
> obvious/irrelevant distribution, that is exactly what particular quantifiers
> do.

M:But not always the references are variable. When I talk of rabbits
in general, I am talking of one thing: rabbits, not about some
rabbit or each rabbit. Examples of things that the old {lo} is not
well equipped to handle are most of the lo examples under the
proposed definition.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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