Re: masses

[Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

> x: I'm not sure what's a typical lion of the intentional world, but I
> think that {lo'e cinfo} is not {lo fadni be le ka cinfo} = "a typical
> holder of the property of being a lion". {lo'e cinfo} is really a place
> filler that avoids having to instantiate with a value from the real world.
> pc: I'm not sure what it would be -- different in different worlds, I
> suppose.  I'm not sure about "typical" either, but it is surely nearer
> that than an empty placeholder, indeed, more than "any-old lion will do,"
> as is usually the case of lion hunting.

I didn't say empty placeholder. {kalte lo'e cinfo}, "lion-hunting", is
definitely different from {kalte lo'e pavyseljirna}, "unicorn-hunting",
so surely there is content in the placeholder. But in neither case are
we concerned with instantiations of the intended preys in the real world.

> The fulfillment set (intentional
> but hopefully overlapping the real, since each real lion will satisfy the
> hunter, but no one preselected).

It doesn't have to overlap the real world, if we want to allow for
unicorn-hunters. Of course any real lion would satisfy the hunter, but
there is no guarantee that one will be found. One may go hunting for lions
in a place where there happen to be no lions at the time.

> pc: I agree on _loi_ (reluctantly, but the
> objections are always coming from one of the other _loi_ stories).  But,
> as you note, none of your translations get the English, the massy cat
> beyond (or bundled in) the various cats.

Maybe the offshoot of this is that we don't require that kind of abstraction
in Lojban. There is no predicate of the form "x1 is x2 pounds of x3",
or "x1 is x2 acres of x3". The Lojban equivalent of these English expressions
is "x1 weighs x2 in pounds", and "x1 measures x2 in acres". The concept of
cattage, which would be needed for the x3 of such hypothetical gismu, is not
needed for the actual way that Lojban handles quantities and measures.

> I suspect that Lojban may need
> either a lujvo, "cat-stuff" and so on,

Well, we can always talk about {kruji lo'e mlatu} = "cat puree", or
{kruji loi mlatu} = "puree made of some cats". In the second case
we are saying that there were some unfortunate cats involved, while
in the first case we avoid the actual realities of how the puree
came to be.

Jorge