Re: TECH: QUERY: quantifier scope & cumki

[Iain Alexander <I.Alexander.bra0125@OASIS.ICL.CO.UK>]

cu'u la kolin.
> > Until I noticed your subject I thought you were asking a different
> > question - not about the predicative 'it is possible' but about
> > the operators of modal logic - 'it is possible that' and
> > 'it is necessary that'. Somehow the selbri 'cumki' and
> > 'nibli' don't seem right for these.

cu'u la djan. kau,n.
> Well, they are and they aren't.  Loglan, generally speaking, takes a Quinian
> view of such things.  "nibli" is closer to the sentence operator Nec, which
> in Quine takes a quoted sentence, than to the standard modal operator nec.

Don't you both mean {sarcu}?

> At least we know that Nec is logically tractable, which is not true of nec --
> cf. the well-known paradox:

>         nec 5 < 9
>         9 = the number of planets
>         nec 5 < the number of planets

> which is fallacious.  Replacing "nec" with "Nec('...')" prevents us from
> inferring things about the opaque argument, and so such bogosities are
> Nec ~.  :-)

I'm not familiar with the particular system(s) you're referring to,
and I may be misunderstanding what you're saying, but surely it *is*
possible to reason about the argument of nec - you just have to be
careful to apply the appropriate rules.

    nec 5 < 9
    nec 5 = the number of Platonic solids
    nec the number of Platonic solids < 9

mu'o mi'e .i,n.