Posted on 10/25/2002 12:14:19 AM PDT by jennyp
Do you deny that the constructs I provided capture the intent of the statements you gave? You said it couldn't be done. I did it. Now you want me to disect them further? Is this a test of my logical parsing abilities or a discussion of the applicability of logic to thought? Must all my responses be in tabulated form to prevent you from running around, saying "See, your response isn't stated formally, ergo, logic isn't the basis of all reason."? Talk about doing away with the aesthic qualities of language.
Prove that "like" is an operator. Can operators be subsumed as you claim I have done?
Yes. And the Pope wore a muzzle until the vague allusions of the christmas, 1942 address his defenders point to with such unwarranted pride.
hmmm. Well, I can definitely say I felt some kind of burning sensation while trying to read the tribal census.
I am not the one who claimed it was either a logical operator or a logical theorem, so proof is not relevant to my contention.
Of course operators can be subsumed. You just make up a predicate statement that assumes that a logical operator, or some attribute of a logical operator holds true. Why would you think otherwise? Did someone say "tap, tap, no predicate statements about logical operators"?
No. In fact, they simply restate what I said with extraneous parentheses added.
You said it couldn't be done. I did it. Now you want me to disect them further?
You haven't "dissected" them at all. If you are going to make claims about logic which are far from obvious, than it is actual logic you must provide as proof.
Is this a test of my logical parsing abilities
not so far.
or a discussion of the applicability of logic to thought?
It is a discussion, including a lot of noise and not much logic, of the unwarranted claim that you made that you could duplicate the "like" "function" in normal use in human reasoning using deductive logic.
Must all my responses be in tabulated form to prevent you from running around, saying "See, your response isn't stated formally, ergo, logic isn't the basis of all reason."? Talk about doing away with the aesthic qualities of language.
At the risk or repeating myself, if you think you can provide a demonstration that the laws of logic can replace the "like" "operator", than you must utilize the laws of logic to do so. If you don't want to call it a formal proof, fine. You still have to apply the laws of logic systematically to demonstrate how you will replace the "like" "operator".
Nothing you have done so far remotely resembled this.
Because I can't pick myself up by my bootstraps.
I try to argue a point with you, and you ignore my response and instead hurl a storm of absurdities at me. I'd like to respond to each one, but there are not enough hours in a lifetime. Maybe someday when you can keep on topic and give some consideration to your opponent's posts, we will attempt to argue again.
I am pleased that these topics interest you, as they do me. Keep reading, keep thinking, for god's sake avoid pop literature on these topics--as arduous as it may seem, read textbooks with theorems (or descriptions of actual experiments in the case of the empirical sciences), and don't accept someone's interpretation without it making clear sense to you.
Finally, strive always for simplicity. Being able to blast a shotload of mathematical terms and names does not mean you understand what you are talking about--and I doubt it fools even those who don't know what you think you are referring to. In fact it reeks of obfuscation.
Live, learn, and have a happy life.
Okay. I think I understand. You don't want to know how to form a statement like[!] "oh, that's just like your father" into a categorical proposition. You want to know how logic was used to arrive at a conclusion like (there's that word again) "A is like B".
"A is like B" is not in the form of a categorical proposition. A has attributes. B has attributes. If, in the eye of the beholder, A and B have a sufficient number of attributes in common, or alternately, have certain specific attributes in common, then the beholder (the one doing the reasoning) uses the word "like" as a short hand to express the results of the comparison. What "A is like B" really means is "A and B are both members of sets W, X, Y, and Z" (or some other combination).
The comparison of the attributes is a straight forward logical comparison. A is in W, B is in W, etc. Not too difficult to formalize. What is more difficult to formalize is how many attributes (or which attributes) must be shared before the "like" threshold has been reached. Different people will often have different thresholds in the same context, and this can result in arguing over the defintion of "like" ("Hillary is like Stalin." "No she isn't, Stalin was a guy." "I wasn't talking about gender, I was talking about political philosophy." "Oh. Then Hillary is like Stalin."). And "like" will have a different threshold for the same person in different contexts. But once you define "like" in a given context, determining if A is like B can logically proceed.
It all depends on what the meaning of the word like is.
Do you like it?
Right
and the word has none.
Of course it does. It's a word, isn't it?
Well, no. Not all words have meaning. Some have apparent meaning until you analyze them and find that they don't refer to anything real.
Here's an example:
Sprite - an elf, fairy or goblin
Elf - one of a class of imaginary beings - with magical powers given to capricious interference in human affairs, and usually imagined to be a diminutive being in human form; sprite, fairy.
Fairy - one of a class of imaginary supernatural beings, generally conceived as having diminutive human form, and intervening with them in human affairs.
Goblin - a grotesque sprite or elf that is that is mischevious or malicious towards people.
And if you look at the synonyms for Fairy it says, sprite, elf, goblin.
So sprite is a goblin, a goblin is an elf, an elf is a fairy and a fairy is a sprite. Now let's go one step further.
Let's define a elgobfairspritathon as the yearly convention of elfs, goblins, fairies and sprites. Let's also say that because the other definition of 'fairy' is a homosexual, that fairies do exist, and if fairies exist, and by this definition they do, then sprites and goblins must exist as well.
Then I say to you, 'there was so much noise at the elgobfairspritathon last night I couldn't sleep.' Now, in reality we have a word, we have defined one, 'elgobfairspritathon' but does it really MEAN anything?
This is the problem I have with the word 'faith.' My dictionary gives 9 meanings to this word. Some of them I can accept and other I cannot. And this is why I am always saying "Equivocation" when these subjects come up. Because in one case a person will apply definition #1, and in the next sentence apply definition #7, and then go on acting as if they were the same thing and they are not.
A common religious definition for faith which I was recently reminded of, which is not in my dictionary, 'evidence of things not seen' is not the same as #4 - belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, (logic) and this is what is continually done in these discussions. This is what I object to. It is saying that sprites exist because fairies exist because there are fairies standing on the street corner right now. The word is so equivocated that it has no meaning anymore.
This is what happens when someone equates 'faith' in God with 'faith' in evolution. It is an equivocation. It is dropping the context, applying a different connotation, and equivocating the issue.
The same can be said for those who insist that human beings are 'animals.' It is an equivocation of the word for the sake of proving a point that cannot be proved.
A fellow in post 1478 disagrees. ;-)
There is a passage that talks about how God instructed the Israelites to set up camp. Seemed boring until I thought that one through. It was genius!
Think about how to get hundreds of thousands of people settled into camp quickly, then how to get them to break camp and get moving quickly. Also think about how in the world you'd keep track of all those people. God solved those problems!
Oh, really? Better tell Daniel Webster and the others who compile dictionaries.
I do believe this is about the silliest comment I've seen on FR yet.
Now that you've experienced LW for yourself.....
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
-- Lewis Carroll , "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland."
A good point.
I'm fairly used to self-declared winners. As you've never offered much of a rebuttul to the glaringly obvious and obnoxious central and undesputed facts, I'd be more inclined to say the argument never began in the first place.
You've already established the Pope was anti Nazi. :-)
Whether or not the Pope was anti-nazi, there is still no reasonable explanation for the uncommented-on behavior of the Catholic church, and most of the lutheran churches throughout nazi held territory in offering up their historical records to SS's jew-ferrets, until the SS started looking for converted jews. No reasonable explanation or excuse has been offered by the oh-so-well-researched book of the other thread, or any book accepted as scholarly, for the priests in the SS, the Tilo regime in Slovokia, the accords of silence Pius the Silent signed with Hitler, or the co-operation and official accolades and confirmations offered by various churches to the nazis for their pursuit of the jews.
Being anti-nazi doesn't demonstrate you aren't anti-jewish, and the church is explicitly expressing anti-jewish sentiment in the doctrine of salvation through crucifixion and resurrection, rather than through works, ie. obeying the law of God, like jews hold.
The Catholic Church owned up this with the "we remember" document. Too bad the rest of the christian world, and most of the laity of the Catholic Church don't have the moral gumption to follow suit. In fact, it's more than too bad, it's immoral at the fundamental heart of what morality is for.
PIUS XII was a good man, no doubt about it, and no doubt felt genuine pain about the treatment of the Jews. But the same constitutive force that's central to christian doctrine regarding salvation makes jews an underclass in the christian world whose torture and murder just don't make to the top rung of christian concerns. One need only consult history leading up to the holocaust to understand how totally this permiated the thinking of those priests who inherited Hitler's world, however generally humane their makeup may have been. How many buildings in the Vatican were dedicated to kidnapping christian children from their parents to be raised jewish, without the law seeing anything untoward about that?
Long-winded as this is, all you have demonstrated is the subsumption I was telling you you were engaged in.
"A is like B" is a predicate of an argument. I'll give you an example of the application of logic in action on a set of predicates, which may help:
"A is like B" and "B is like C", therefore "A is like C".
Notice my capacity to do a formal logical sorite(s) here without having to understand anything about what "like" means.
To actually demonstrate that "like" is some sort of logical theorem--which I can apply to transmute a predicate or set of predicates into something else, like I did in the example above--that can be derived from logical operators, you must provide the proof of the theorem.
Lots of explanation you feel really strong about is not a proof, and this is a pretty technically specific claim you are trying to make, so a technical demonstration isn't the least bit unreasonable to expect.
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