Posted on 06/06/2006 5:13:56 AM PDT by governsleastgovernsbest
Exactly, she was not restricting the class to DDT effects, and your lame attempts to pretend she must have meant to are entirely your own. She was speaking of the resilence of birds as a class, to environmental disruptions as a class. And your trying to pretend that means she called bald eagles rats - when she neither said it nor implied it - is simply bad faith and the fallacy of division.
Which everyone knows including yourself, and which you were called on instantly and correctly.
You keep repeating that. Bald eagles are an instance of the class of birds. Bald eagle mortality from DDT is an instance of the class of environmental disputions. Bald eagles are therefore part of the intersection of the two sets. The logical relation of the resilience of birds as a class to environmental disruption as a class can only apply to the intersection of the two sets, since otherwise one or the other does not apply. Ergo, bald eagles are indeed what she was referring to in 'birds are like rats'.
And your trying to pretend that means she called bald eagles rats - when she neither said it nor implied it - is simply bad faith and the fallacy of division.
Attempted 'proof' by repeated assertion of a fallacy. Tiresome and very dumb.
Now we know what pathetic audience Coulter was writing for ... people too stupid to understand what see writes in the first place or too self-righteous to actually think about it. What a weird gig she has.
"Birds are like rats". Not "some birds", not "many birds", "birds". In English, usage of 'Xs are Y" clearly carries the implication "all Xs are Y. Use of the unqualified term carries an implication of generality or universality. The idea that, of the three species in the intersection of the two sets, Coulter meant to include two in and exclude one from the comparison with rats, is just plain idiotic. If I showed you three cards, two of which were black and one was white, would you say that "the cards are black" was a true statement?
Some women are undoubtedly whores. In fact, many women are whores. So, according to you, "women are whores" is a true statement. I guess that puts you in with Dr. Dre.
When something is predicated of a class, it is not thereby predicated of every member of that class. See the example of wages of progammers for a typical common use. Classes or compositions may in general have attributes entirely distinct from those of their members. E.g. the set of all integers is not an integer. Sodium and chloride are each poisonous, sodium chloride is not poisonous.
Statements about classes that are explicitly meant to run downward without exception are verbally marked by quantifiers, by saying "all" or "every". A statement about a class without such a universal quantifier does not mean "some", either - one may be speaking of an attribute of the class as such e.g. the cardinality of the integers is aleph null. Which does not imply that the cardinality of any integer taken separately, let alone of each of them taken separately, is aleph null.
When a statement is meant to run downward without being universal, but is not restricted to an attribute of the class as distinct from its members, it may be marked by "some" or in more careful context, by "there exists a ... such that ..."
When something is predicated of a member, it is not thereby predicated of all classes of which that something is a member. See the example of salt, above, which is an instance of the related fallacy running in the other direction, the fallacy of composition.
Distinctions are allowed to "tree" orthogonally in any desired manner, controlled by the speaker and his intention, and read charitably in the senses intended. Speakers are not responsible for marking up their speech with exact quantifiers in ordinary usage - they are expected to be understood. Forced readings of another's statements that change them in order to make their statements seem less reasonable, are another well known sophistic tactic, the straw man.
You simply don't have a leg to stand on. Coulter never said eagles are rats, and she did not imply it either. You are attempting to put words into her mouth, but it is hopeless. The words are in your mouth, not in hers.
Gibber gibber gibber. The verbosity of this attempted reply to a simple question is a clear indication you're stuck in a corner, and are trying to snow your way out.
In ordinary English usage, is the statement "women are whores" true or false?
In ordinary English usage, if you were presented with pictures of two prostitutes and Mother Teresa, would the statement "these women are whores" be true or false?
A statement about a class without such a universal quantifier does not mean "some", either - one may be speaking of an attribute of the class as such e.g. the cardinality of the integers is aleph null. Which does not imply that the cardinality of any integer taken separately, let alone of each of them taken separately, is aleph null.
That's laughably irrelevant. In saying 'birds are like rats', we are not claiming that being like a rat is a attribute of the class Aves, but not of individual birds. That would be a category error. We are making a statement about the individual members, and their resilience.
When a statement is meant to run downward without being universal, but is not restricted to an attribute of the class as distinct from its members, it may be marked by "some" or in more careful context, by "there exists a ... such that ..."
We're speaking English here, not C++. Try to remember that.
The resiliency seen empirically (which is the attribute shared with the object of the comparison i.e. the point of similarity to resilient rats) applies to the class, and not to its individual members. People kill rats all the time. They employ traps, poisons, cats, etc. These readily kill individual rats. Where there is any food for them, however, rats will soon be found again. Resilience of a class, in a familiar way. Thus an apt simile for the point she wished to make.
As for your silly examples, the attribute predicated does not belong to the class (or in your discrete case, the set) of which it is predicated, that is all.
You are free to maintain that birds are not rats, in general, and to disagree with Coulter on that basis. You are not free to pretend she said eagles are rats when she neither said nor implied any such thing. She is, incidentally, free to follow up and say that eagles are rats if she chooses. If she doesn't, you haven't a leg to stand on.
BS. Individual birds were killed. Individual birds returned. Individual eagles were rendered sterile by DDT.
The resiliency seen empirically (which is the attribute shared with the object of the comparison i.e. the point of similarity to resilient rats) applies to the class, and not to its individual members. People kill rats all the time. They employ traps, poisons, cats, etc. These readily kill individual rats. Where there is any food for them, however, rats will soon be found again. Resilience of a class, in a familiar way. Thus an apt simile for the point she wished to make.
There is nothing about the resiliency of a class of rats or birds that is not completely determined by the properties of the individual birds or rats. You're desperately handwaving. You can only reduce a population of eagles by acting on the individual birds.
As for your silly examples, the attribute predicated does not belong to the class (or in your discrete case, the set) of which it is predicated, that is all.
You have shown nothing about the example that is an attribute of the class as opposed to an attribute of individuals. Your silly example of sodium chloride is a case where both the sodium metal and the chlorine molecules are transformed chemically in order to make the salt. Birds are not transformed into something different by being several.
As for your silly examples, the attribute predicated does not belong to the class (or in your discrete case, the set) of which it is predicated, that is all.
Nonsense. You have totally failed to demonstrate why, if I kill 90 out of a 100 individual birds, I will do anything else than reduce the size of the class by 90%. It won't be reduced by 90.1%. It won't be reduced by 89.9%. There is absolutely nothing in the properties of the collective, with respect to survival, that is not a simple sum of the survival of the individual birds.
Now answer the questions.
You are not free to pretend she said eagles are rats when she neither said nor implied any such thing.
Eagles are birds. Birds are like rats, according to Coulter. Therefore eagles are like rats, according to Coulter. Deal with it.
A more biologically ignorant statement it is hard to conceive. Reduce the population of cod by half without changing any of its capacity determining variables, and you double the external resources per remaining cod. Their growth rate will therefore increase, compared to what it would have been. There are automatic restoring forces in biological niches. Equilibrium populations are set by balancing rates and approach from either direction on "S" curves. The forces acting temporarily on the population number and those acting on its equilibrium level are distinct. You might as readily say that power terms don't set equilibrium temperatures.
The salt example is a fallacy of composition, whereas you commit the fallacy of division. The reason neither work is the same - composition, classes, or wholes are not their members, but are distinct from them, and may introduce or change any attribute by their relation. The set of integers is not an integer, the attributes of infantry divisions are not the attributes of privates, etc. You are one of the only people in the world who does not know this, you are hopelessly wrong about it, and you have been given ample instruction to correct the mistake.
The rest is the weakness of pride.
The survival of the collective is still a sum of the survival of the individual cod. It is the survival probability of the individual cod that has changed.
And answer question 2, or explain why, in a set of three women, two women being whores does not permit one to say that "these women are whores", whereas, in a set of birds of three kinds, birds of two kinds being like rats permits one to say that "these birds are like rats".
The set of integers is not an integer, the attributes of infantry divisions are not the attributes of privates, etc. You are one of the only people in the world who does not know this, you are hopelessly wrong about it, and you have been given ample instruction to correct the mistake.
"Birds" is not "the set of birds". It's "birds". Coulter did not say "the set of birds", she said "birds", which is the plural of "bird", not the class Aves, not a species of birds or several species of birds. Capisci? The rest is the weakness of pride.
I can't imagine what you're proud of. Dogged persistence in pursuing a lost cause, perhaps?
And answer question 2, or explain why, in a set of three women, two women being whores does not permit one to say that "these women are whores", whereas, in a set of birds of three kinds, birds of two kinds being like rats permits one to say that "these birds are like rats".
The set of integers is not an integer, the attributes of infantry divisions are not the attributes of privates, etc. You are one of the only people in the world who does not know this, you are hopelessly wrong about it, and you have been given ample instruction to correct the mistake.
"Birds" is not "the set of birds". It's "birds". Coulter did not say "the set of birds", she said "birds", which is the plural of "bird", not the class Aves, not a species of birds or several species of birds. Capisci? The rest is the weakness of pride.
I can't imagine what you're proud of. Dogged persistence in pursuing a lost cause, perhaps?
A population P of 1000 individuals I1, I2, ... is subjected to a stress that has a 10% chance of killing any given member of the population. The chances are effectively independent.
(1) what is the probability that the pair of individuals {I9, I43}, both elements of P both die?
(2) what is the probability that the entire population dies?
(3) what is the probability that the population falls below 100 (due to the immediate action of the stresser alone)?
(4) A hypothetical person gives as his answer to (2) the answer "10%", reasoning that the property of the ensemble must be the same as that property in each of its members, since the ensemble is nothing but the members taken together. What is ratio between the correct answer and his answer i.e. the extent of his mathematical error?
(5) Same as the previous, different question asked of the same hypothetical. What error in reasoning does the hypothetical person of (4) commit?
It doesn't. Women are whores is false of the class women, without being logically reducible to the proposition "all women are whores", which is a distinct proposition that is also false. Women raise our children, on the other hand, is true without being logically reducible to the proposition "all our children are raised by women", which is not true. In both statements without an "all", that a normal or common case is intended as the scope of the statement, is understood. In your sentence the statement is false of that normal or common case, and in mine it is true of that normal or common case.
"whereas "birds are like rats" should not imply that all birds are like rats."
Simple, adding a universal quantifier to the front of a statement in general changes the logical meaning of that statement. The original proposition and the new one may both be true, or both be false, or one may be true and the other false - because they are different propositions.
"And lose the silly list of fallacies"
You can go educate yourself about them any time you like, to me they are like breathing or addition, I just assume every intelligent person knows all about them. When they aren't familiar with the terms, they still immediately recognize what they mean and that they are truths as soon as they are explained - just like elementary math. Unless, of course, they willfully resist instruction for tangential reasons.
I will also point out that the additional word "like" in Coulter's statement is a signal that a simile is being employed. Similes compare unlike entities that are alike in some respect, using the point of similarity to illustrate a concept (or for artistic purposes or allusion etc). Coulter did not mean that birds are mammals, or furry, or have long thin tails, or whiskers, or any of a number of other characteristics of rats.
What she meant is transparent from the context, in which she discussed the return of birds to an area in which the existing ones had all been killed or had left. She appeals to a common experience people have had eradicating rats. That is, that killing a bunch of them does not stop there from being rats there a short while later, when the causes attracting them remain.
Just as one may kill many rats intentionally without removing rats from one's environment, one may kill many birds unintentionally without removing birds from one's environment. The simile compares the classes in their robustness with respect to individual deaths. The comparison is entirely apt, unexceptional, and on point. No doubt Coulter also enjoys the way it makes greens bounce off the ceiling - similes can be chosen for such allusive or secondary purposes.
Nowhere in which is there any provision of a "for every" over the class of birds, and nowhere is there the slightest hint of an allusion to the ratlikeness of bald eagles, which is quite entirely your own creation. Based, apparently, on an inability to reason or to tell a piece of well known sophistry from an argument.
"in a set of three women, two women being whores does not permit one to say that "these women are whores"
You can say it, but it would be false. If you said "all these" it would be trivially so. If you said "some of these" it would be trivially true. If you said "most of these" it would be trivially true. When you leave all of those possible quantifiers off, you invite the reader to construct from the context the unifying feature of the class, that is the intended point of reference for the question. As here that feature is not "are whores", the first is false. No one evidentally went out and took pictures of whores for a collection. No one evidentally reached for the best simple description on an intended class, in the predicated term.
"she said "birds", which is the plural of "bird""
Sure, which is what came back after the spill. Not the previous birds, not the exact composition or number, not the whole family of species, but a bunch of birds. Birds as a group that migrates to available habitat are much more resilient than the specific subset of birds there at one time e.g. just before the spill.
"I can't imagine what you're proud of."
What a revealing error. I was ascribing the pride to you. Pride is a weakness, not a virtue.
Oh please. "women raise our children" contains the transitive verb "raise", not the copula. And "all our children are raised by women" is a passive construction to boot, with subject altered. "Women are whores" can be disproven by producing one female non-whore. "Women climb Everest" cannot be disproven by finding one woman who hasn't climbed Everest. You can't replace the copula isomorphously by a transitive verb.
This conversation is over. You called me a liar. Challenged to back it up, you've wasted thousands and words and a good half hour of my time with arguments a high-school student could drive a truck through. Take a long walk off a short pier.
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