Re: Veridical and Masses (was Nick tries valiantly...)

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    While I do not feel qualified to make claims about the precise
meanings of words in lojban, I can not resist commenting on the
distinctions between the ideas of mass and sets.  When <jimc> writes
(reformated):

> For me, "mass" has been even more slippery than "veridical sumti".
> When the team (mass) carries the log, I have a lot of trouble to
> distinguish this from how the set carries the log.  OK, a set has
> no arms, but neither does a team, only the members of the (team,
> set) have arms.  Similarly, in a sports team each member has a ...

My understanding of it is that a team has arms; a team is a unit,
an organism, that includes all that its member contribute.  In the example,
they contribute, for the duration of the task, all of their bodies
and the better the team, the more the available arms function as the
arms of this organism (the team).  The members of a set never give up
any of their individuality by set membership nor is there implicit
transitivity (given 2 sets A & B such that A contains B and B contains 
any other object C, there is no implication that A contains C).
There are many more things that can be said of the team that can not
be said of the set of players not even with a simple function to combine
the properties of the players.  The team can be from Dover even though
no member is from Dover.  The team can lift a 1000 pound log even if
none of its members can lift more than 250.  The team may not be able
to accept directions in Spanish even though one of its members can.
And it is absurd to try to make those claims about a set.  Sets of
players can not lift anything, nor do sets accept directions.
(Sets are very similar to numbers in this regard).


> In short, I don't see much need to distinguish between sets and masses.  

While this is certainly understandable from the fool on the street,
serious technical, intellectual, and academic endeavors need to
routinely distinguish between these concepts.

Without understanding the term "veridical", I can easily see the need
for the distinction between "lo" and "da noi".  In science, we frequently
deal with hypotheses and need to make true claims about
an oject/event/interaction regardless of whether the referent exists
or can exist.  In fact, the proofs of non-existance are based on the
required properties of the non-existant thing.
(Again, few of the fools on the street corner can comprehend these
arguments, but that's why they sit on the street corner all day and
the rest of us work.  I expect my children to come to understand these
arguments and have no interest in any reduction in the clarity of language
since that would impede my profession and risk my childrens future!!!)

    thank you,
    Art Protin


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.