Re: events - repsonse to And

[jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU]

la lojbab cusku di'e

> Bottom line:  The use of "lo [unicorn]" has never claimed that a unicorn
> exists in the 'real world'.

But that is also the bottom line for {da}. The "existence" of the
existence quantifier only says that there is a referent. The referent
of {lo pavyseljirna} is the same one of {da poi pavyseljirna}.
In most cases, it is a character of fiction. Within a story, it may
be a real flesh and blood object for that universe. It all depends
on the accepted definition of the predicate {pavyseljirna} by those who
are using it to communicate. If you say "unicorns don't exist", you
are using "unicorn" to refer to real flesh and blood animals in our
real world. If you say "unicorns have one horn", you are using
"unicorn" with a slightly different meaning: the mythological character,
a character of fiction, that has all the properties that characters
can have. Or someone might be using it to mean the real life beasts
that inhabit their world. But all these possibilities are exactly
parallel for {lo pavyseljirna} and {da poi pavyseljirna}.


> >And a consensus emerged last year that {da poi nu broda zohu brode} is
> >synonymous with {brode fa lo nu broda} (though (for reasons not clear to
> >me) you & pc wish this were not the case).
>
> That transformation appears to be a simple manipulation assuming "lo" =
> "dapoi".  But it is not clear to me that the transform is invariant
> under full quantification.  If pc objects, i suspect that it is not.
> Remember that the predicate inside a "nu" and the one inside a "poi"
> both have their own independent prenexes.  Those prenexes may not
> inherently be exportable out to the main level as part of simple
> manipulation.

The prenex of {nu} is of no consequence, because it appears equally in
{lo nu ...} and {da poi nu ...}.
The prenex of {poi} can't go directly to the {lo} form. But even if that
was a problem, nobody suggested that {lo} and {dapoi} can be replaced
mindlessly one for the other. All we said was that {lo} can always be
rephrased as {da poi}. The reverse is not obviously true, for {dapoi}
permits much more freedeom of structure.

>  If "lo" = "dapoi", then talking about
> imaginary things is modfiying the definition of the universe to include
> those things.

Talking about imaginary things is talking about imaginary things.
It makes as much sense to say that all unicorns (characters) have
one horn, as to say that all numbers (abstract objects) are less than
some other number.

In both cases we are talking about abstract objects, to which we
assign properties by convention.

> I personally would like to be able to assume that someone using "da" (at
> least unmarked by a discursive) IS making a claim of real existance.

And what do you mean by real existance? Do numbers have real existence?
Do you mean that they can be touched, or that they can be conceived
(by the mind, of course)?

> But I do NOT want to assume that a "lo" description is implying the real
> existance of the thing described.

It doesn't, just as {da} shouldn't either. They imply existence of
referent. What are acceptable referents is determined by what the
speakers of the language accept as brodas. (In the case of "unicorn"
in English, most of us would accept them as mythological characters,
existing as mythological characters, thus lo unicorn is lo mythological
character unicorn, and not lo real breathing flesh and blood unicorn,
and we have no problem with assigning properties to mythological
characters as mythological characters.)

Jorge