Re: opacity

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@access.digex.net>]

>Sorry, I just don't get it.  The various abstractors create a variety of 
>different kinds of objects (numbers, functions and situations on the 
>least discriminating story), so how can they all be treated as the same>or at leat have their differences ignored, with su'u?

Suffice it to say that I had a different idea of the effect of abstractors at 
teh time (whether it is valid or not).  Just as it is permissiblke tolook
at a predicate as a noun, a verb, an adverb, or an adjective, and it was just
a different way of looking at the same thing, just as the Aksionsart are just
another way of looking at "nu", I presumed that teh abstractors were 
collectively just another set of ways of looking at the predication.  i.e
the value/degree to which something is running is "how it runs", so are the
properties of the running, so is the fact that it runs, so is the
experience of it running (per Frazee).  The house of cards that is su'u was
built solidly from the fact that "see how they run" attracted so many 
different and irreconcilible understandings about what was being "seen", that
all we could clearly agree upon was that we were examining some abstract
nature of the "running".  Hence su'u.

su'u was not intended to have anything to do with opaque contexts, which were
not recognized as an issue at the time.

tu'a was not intended to have anything to do with opaque contexts, which were
not recognized as an issue at the time.

tu'a was designed for our old friend sumti-raising - to mark a hidden
abstractor (which again is an abstractor of an undefined nature).

tu'a is not limited to nu, or ka, (or su'u) - we have seen it used in all
manner of places.  The most obvious is djuno  x1 knows x2 about x3 ...
In most cases x2 is an abstraction, of which x3 is a sumti.  But when you
try to apply it to normal English sentences, it gets to be hard to figure 
out what is x3 and what is x3:

I know the score
x1 knows fi le [score]
or
x1 knows tu'a le [score]
?  In other words, to know the score does not seem to be to know "about"
the score - that is not the natural value for x3, which is probably the game
that the score is "about".

On the other hand, "I know about the cat" means either
mi djuno fi le mlatu
or
mi djuno tu'a le mlatu
where the x2 expressed as an abstraction would be
mi djuno ledu'u le mlatu cu co'e
where co'e is a compound preduicate that somehow combines all of the different
relationships, whose facts constitute our knowledge about the cat.

Here tu'a is clearly being used for a ledu'u, because by definition the x2
of djuno is a du'u abstraction.  Or rather it is a comglomoration of such
abstractions since we will likely never be able to accurately form the co'e
that is the implied inner predicate (the facts we know about something is
an open-ended and ever changing set - by making a sentence about the cat, we
have added a fact that we know about the cat - that it was just talked about
by us in this sentence).

In any event, du'u got coopted into the non-MEX grammar in order to
fill the x2 of djuno. But then we found that wwe were using du'u in other 
places as well, and somethimes they were NOT The abstract "fact" in the same
sense.  Sometimes we were using du'u to stand for the predication, and
sometimes for the words that expressed the predication.  (is the x1 of
bridi a text, or the predication that the text communicates?  On the other
hand, when we express that bridi, we are expressing the text of the bridi
and not the relationshiop itself (usually %^).

WE thus gave du'u the x1 and x2 places to link these two ways that people seem
to in natlang look at expression - both as the text itself, and as the
meaning of the text.  And we now clearly use ledu'u in some places, and
le sedu;u in others.

Still no opaqueness issues have been raised.  Opaqueness never reared its ugly
head until all this stuff was olidly in the language for other reasons, all of
which I am sure we discussed with you over the phone, since they were added
back then when we were talking regularly, and indeed when you were still
coming to LogFests.

Opaqueness first entered when Cowan tried to deal with "John seeks a bicycle
or a fish", which involves both intensionality, opaqueness, and speaker
vs object point of view.  But we passed off the opaqueness issue, i think,
by using lo or loi.  Opaqueness never came up again until Iain Alexander
challenged specifically the place struture of sisku - and again this was
dealt with (by changing the place structure and forgetting the issue.  I think
at that point, I worked out a meaning for kalte that did NOT allow for opaque
contexts, but it was probably invalid, but in any case kalte was not discussed.
Opaquensss came up for the last explosive time when you were alredy on the net,
and Jorge started looking for a box in Sept 94.  That discussion was never
resolved, though I had the clear idea that you thought that your comntext leaper
would do it - just couldn;t manage to communicate this to the others who kept on
bringing up distracting issues that had little to do with opaqueness (like
existence of unicorns, typical (lo'e), quantifiers, etc.)

>You (all -- I'm not sure who's included, but I volunteer)

Your hired.  Solution please  %^)
>need 
>to decide how to deal with opaque contexts and intensions generally and 
>stick to it, rather than patching each fractional problem as it comes 
>along (often without checking up on the last "solution").

I don't think that the number of problems to be solved is all that large
- it is just that we are reading the opaqueness problem into a lot of areas
where we used to be merely context to call it an "abstraction
"

>By the way, 
>du'u, at least as & seems to use it, looks to be another mare's nest.

And refuses to use du'u because he sees a rat's nest.  No one has yet been 
able to explain to me what rats nest he sees, other than the fact that he doesn't like turning a predicate into an abstraction in order to satisfy the places 
where du'u is used.  His kuau or whatever seems to be identical to ledu'u or
lodu'u or da poi du'u.  he does not acceptthat the sedu'u has anything to
do with kuau (I think, but am not sure of this).  He is generally opposed
to one placed prediucates seems to be his basic justification, and du'u to 
him is like munje is for others, a one place predicate with by definition
singular membership in the x1.  I just do my best to ignore this, since
it seems a philosophical issue - I could probably find several other bridi
where all the places are codependent in such a way that one could say that
it was a singular one-place predicate.

In any event, you are welcome to make pronouncements, and i suggest like in
other situations that you, me and Cowan try to agree before we try to convince
other people of the decision (I think that part of the problem in 1994 was that
just when we got something settled you made an erroneous choice of cmavo out
of rustiness, and in trying to interpret it, people discovered distracting
issues.)  (Nora of course will be indirectly in the discussion at this end - 
she is up to chapter 4 of Mccawley and is NOT finding it easy going.)

lojbab