Re: TECH: lambda and "ka" revisited

[ucleaar <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

John:
> > Subscripting should, I opined, be at most a mere convention, while my
> > prenex proposals should be honoured with the status of Grammaticalized
> > Rule.
> So they are.

Do you mean they have been adopted by Lojban Central?

> But subscripting is sometimes more than a convention, as in "sexixa"
> (the x1-x6 transposer) and "daxire" (the second in the infinite set
> of distinct da-cmavo).

Fine. I see that, and see no objection to it. But the kea-subscripting
idea is in the relative clause paper, and there I think it should be
more clearly flagged as Mere Convention.

> > > > It is very naughty of Lojban to exhibit type-token ambiguity. It of
> > > > all languages should be well-behaved. It's why I say such-and-such
> > > > a selbri shd be a sumti, and vice versa.
> > If {zo} were a selbri, I'd say:
> >      mi cusku suo zo djan
> >      mi se cmene loe zo djan / mi se cmene ro zo djan
> I suppose we could save the face of Lojban by (artificially) construing
> the "zo djan." in "mi se cmene zo djan." as the baptizing instance.

But in fact {suo zo djan} and {ro zo djan} are okay, aren't they?

> > > > I think I'd like to argue that "abstraction" has no meaning, at least
> > > > not beyond the n-adic ka/duu.
> Why?  There are many abstractions reified by Lojban.  Numbers are
 abstractions,
> sets are abstractions, masses are abstractions: at least, none of them are
> concrete objects.  Quine argues that the concrete objects and the sets are
> all that is really required, but we need not follow him.

I thought "abstraction" necessarily involved a bridi. I have no problem
with sets or numbers, and only minor problems with masses. But they don't
involve bridi. But Lojban abstractions, NU, do. These I have problems
with.

> > > The point is that every other abstraction can be expressed as a "su'u"
> > > with an appropriate x2:  "nu" is "su'u ... kei be lo fasnu", "jei" is
> > > "su'u ... kei be lo niljetnu", etc.
> > I think I get it.
> >    lo suu broda kei be lo ganxo
> > is equivalent to
> >    lo ganxo poi kea duu broda
> >    lo duu broda kei poi kea ganxo
> No, I don't think so. It's the asshole-abstraction of
> something-unspecified being a thingummy, whatever that is.  But it is not
> necessarily itself an asshole: "le nu broda kei cu na fasnu" can be true,
> although not by your reading of "nu".

I'm gobsmacked by that. How can "lo nu broda kei cu na fasnu" be true?

> > - Or? Since a bridi is not a fasnu, or a ganxo, or whatever, these would
> > always fail to refer, unless used with a nonveridical gadri.
> A bridi is not a fasnu, a ckaji, a klani, ... either.

Right. I don't argue with that.

> > > In that case, how do you say "I desire George Wallace to be etc."?
> > > Certainly "mi djica le nu ..." is traditional here. There is a difference
> > > between what contingently didn't happen, but could have, and what is
> > > not a happening at all.
> > We've debated this before. I insist that {lo nu} refers to an actual
> > happening, not something that could have happened but didnt. So I would
> > say {mi djica lo dahi nu}, here, where {nu} is extensionally the set
> > of all actual events and {dahi nu} is extensionally the set of all
> > imaginable events.
> Here we must agree to disagree, I fear. I read an event as including
> anything that might happen; I'm willing to be neutral on the legitimacy
> of {nu li 2 + 2 = 5}.

We go round and round in circles on this one. {mi djica lo plise}
entails "Ex apple(x)...", but does that mean x exists, or merely that
it is imaginable? Put another way, must it be true of what we are
currently taking to be the real world, or must it merely be true of
some imaginable world?

Jorge
> What is a bridi, exactly? Is a bridi a chunk of text or is it a
> proposition? Should I say {le du'u broda cu bridi} or {lu broda
> li'u bridi}?

Say the former. I take bridi to mean "proposition". But Lojbo
metalanguage in English confuses text and lae text (CONTRARY TO
WHAT IS CLAIMED IN TEXT.TXT!) & out of laziness & lack of
terminology, noone gets too het up about the confusion.
---
And