Re: [spoon-discuss] Re: [Spoon-business] [PGo] Alliance

[Rob Speer <rspeer@xxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Sep 14, 2003 at 08:21:24PM -0400, Daniel Lepage wrote:
> >You are saying that a set of stones (in particular, a set of one stone)
> >owned by me is also a set of stones owned by me and BvS. This is not 
> >how
> >English works - if I solely own a couch, it would be false to say that
> >the couch belongs to me and George Bush.
> 
> That's not what I'm claiming; in fact, I'm claiming the opposite - that 
> the sentence means a Dragon is a set of stones *each of which* is owned 
> by one of a set of allied players. Otherwise, RRGG isn't a dragon at 
> all unless all four stones belong to both of you, which isn't possible.

And the couch is a set of cushions and other parts, *each of which*
belongs to either me or George Bush. Specifically, me.

That doesn't make it George Bush's and my couch. Similarly, that doesn't
make a dragon consisting of entirely my stones Baron's and my dragon.

You're applying transformations from logic/set theory to English. That
doesn't work.

> "A set of stones that belong to players who..." taken out of context 
> best means a set of stones all of which are owned by the players who... 
> But since no stone can be owned by more than one player, that'd be 
> ridiculous.

Certainly. You're doing another, equally ridiculous, logical
transformation on the sentence.

If you want this in more precise terms, then we have constructs in
language called collectives, which act differently from any of their
parts. Craig and I study a language called Lojban which is based on
logic, and it has to deal carefully with collectives for this reason.

The properties of a collective are neither a union nor an intersection
of the properties of its members. In your first reinterpretation, you
considered the collective a union; in your second, you considered it an
intersection.

You are pretending that collectives don't exist, which would cause large
parts of the language to break down. Consider the phrase "Three men
carried the sofa"; if the sofa is too heavy for one man to carry, then
it would be false to say that each individual man carried the sofa. It
would also be false to say that five men carried the sofa, even if there
are two other men standing around there.

So all three men are carrying this sofa without any one of them doing
it. That's a collective.
-- 
Rob Speer

_______________________________________________
spoon-discuss mailing list
spoon-discuss@xxxxxxxxx
http://lists.ellipsis.cx/mailman/listinfo/spoon-discuss