WikiDiscuss

WikiDiscuss


BPFK Section: gadri

19: OK. But you need to make it clear that you are allowing for quantification over non-existents. That is a perfectly good way to go and, once started, seems to require that you go all the way. We probably then need a different set of quantifiers for the existents, since it is often important to know that something really exists. The old rules for quantifiers (for the zastis) are then applied only to this restricted set and the unbounded set covers everything and always applies. I was attributing to you a less drastic change, taking {lo zasti} to apply to a kind, an abstract entity, which by convention would therefore exist, and then (mistakenly) saying that it did not exist since it had no instances. And indeed that is closer to what you now claim, since Mr.Unicorn is said not to exist in this world but to be nonetheless. I'm not sure what that does to the problem inference, but I think it still makes the start {mi djica lo pavyseljirna} false, like the fronted version.
However, this gets tangled with the ambiguity of {lo pavyseljirna} so I am not sure.
I hope, by the way, that the shift to quantifying over the outer domain is made for carefully considered reason, not just to save a few embarassing cases.
Jorge LlambĂ­as <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
pc:
> 4: Well, it is certainly possibly true here and now that I want a unicorn,
> but it is certain false of some unicorn I want it. There are no unicorns
> (and thus, as xorxes says sometimes, no Mr. Unicorn either).

19:I make a distinction between the predicate {zasti} and the "there is"
of existential quantification. I have no problem with:

su'o da naku zasti
There are things that don't exist (in this world).

I wouldn't say that there is no Mr Unicorn. I'd say that Mr Unicorn
is such that he does not exist in this world (and the same thing I
would say of Mary Poppins, for example.)

mu'o mi'e xorxes





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