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To: JasonC
You are simply wrong about the standard meaning of classes in ordinary English usage, and about the logical relations between classes and their members. The latter has been known with some exactness since the scholastics, at the latest. The twin fallacies of composition and of division expose the slips routinely committed in misuses of logic in merely verbal wordplay, which generate scads of false syllogisms. You should have learned this in your first year of college, if it wasn't covered in your high school.

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.

347 posted on 06/08/2006 1:42:48 PM PDT by Right Wing Professor (...I'm dancin' right there with you, Iraqis.)
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To: Right Wing Professor
Um, no, we are not making a statement about individual birds. After the oil spill, dead oil-soaked birds did not rise from the grave. Other birds came to the area. The new birds might well have been of different species from the old ones, or a different mix. They certainly were not the old bird individually. They remain "birds". Before spill, birds are present, after spill birds are present. The presence of the class is robust to the disturbance caused by the spill.

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.

348 posted on 06/08/2006 2:24:18 PM PDT by JasonC
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