Subject: RE: Logic deemed illogical! Area man protests.
From: Steven Gabriel (sgabriel@willamette.edu)
Date: Mon Jan 10 2000 - 03:24:15 EST
> You're playing a sort of semantic 3-Card Monty with the '+' operator,
> Steven, but your hand was not quite fast enough. With apples, your '+' means
> addition. With raindrops, it seems to mean 'mixed with'. One of the rules is
> that you have to pick a meaning and stick with it, I'm afraid. Otherwise,
> the debate degenerates into a trivial dispute over definition of terms.
Exactly. My point is that everything falls of out of how you pick your
'+' operator. I mean, both '+' operators have a context for which they
are useful. Would the REAL '+' operator please stand up? There is none.
This is because we make '+' operators as we go, to fit whatever context we
may be talking about at the time.
I could just as easily pick '>' to be an operator that means "is the
father of." Then, it would not be transitive as my grandfather is clearly
not also my father. Once we fix a meaning to '>' then it is transitive or
not. The way you are talking about such operators though, you really want
to imply that '>' is transitive long before a meaning is fixed for it.
I hope this makes sense. If not, please put forth another email about it.
It's quite nice to have a chance to talk about an issue that I find can be
very confused.
S.
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: Steven Gabriel -- sgabriel@willamette.edu :
: http://www.willamette.edu/~sgabriel :
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: "Sitting quietly doing nothing, :
: Spring comes and the grass grows by itself." :
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