WikiDiscuss

WikiDiscuss


BPFK Section: gadri

1. I don't think so. Once you do it you seem to be committing the language. To be sure, you could contextualize (put the scope in an opaque clause) and go on from there. This is one standard work-around logicians use for English, which is very sloppy about this. Lojban ought to do better, not leaving it to context. And just how would those contexts be described? What separates {la crlakolmz xabju la lndn} from {la tonibler xabju la lndn} so that we can sort out what is real from what is not. (By the way, I would kee the current quantifiers for existents and add the outer domain one on, just as a practical matter.)

2: Or with a somewhat longer cmavo list, either more quantifiers or perhaps more "trenses" "in story" relevantly in this cse. And, of course, all of these (like everything else in Lojban) are optional in most speech situations. The point is to have the tools when more precision is needed.

3: Shift! The present quantifiers are explicitly real-world (and, indeed, I would have said — if asked — that you were one of the people who jumped on me for suggesting otherwise. Since, in the outer domain, neither {ro} nore {su'o} goes unfufilled, many questions disappear — including, obviously, the one about how many whojis there are for internal quantification. Hooray!)
Jorge LlambĂ­as <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:

pc:
> 19: OK. But you need to make it clear that you are allowing for
> quantification over non-existents.

1. That depends on the context, doesn't it? Surely sometimes you
quantify over non-existents when speaking in English and other
times you don't. If context does not make it clear that you
are restricting it to existents, you can always say
{ro da poi zasti zi'e poi ...}, {su'o da poi zasti zi'e poi ...}.

> 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.

2:When it is not obvious what you mean, you can explicitly restrict
with {poi zasti}. In a similar way, sometimes we use {no da} when
we mean {no da poi prenu}, and so on. If you want to buy more
precision you have to pay with more verbosity.

> 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.

3:Shift?

mu'o mi'e xorxes





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