Re: ``We didn't find something.''

From: Greg Lee (greg_at_ling.lll.hawaii.edu)
Date: 10/11/04


Date: 11 Oct 2004 12:29:43 GMT

Ron Hardin <rhhardin@mindspring.com> wrote:
...
> Formal logic reduces natural language to something it is not. So the map doesn't go
> back to natural language.

Formal logic is a syntactic theory of natural language that describes
scope relations very well. That is its strong point.

> In particular, ``find'' can't be isolated from its object by saying it's
> negated separately.

Who said it was negated separately?

> Finding something and not finding something aren't relatd that
> way.

Who said they were? Negation in predicate logic applies to sentences, not
to predicates.

...

-- 
Greg Lee <greg@ling.lll.hawaii.edu>


Relevant Pages

  • Re: ``We didnt find something.
    ... Greg Lee wrote: ... >> Formal logic reduces natural language to something it is not. ... So the map doesn't go ... ``Not '' is not the meaning of ``I didn't find anything.'' ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Py3K idea: why not drop the colon?
    ... Unfortunately natural language is completely riddled with ambiguities ... about negation and conjunction. ... Similar negations of two English verbs with virtually identical meaning ... I think part of learning to think like a computer is learning to stop ...
    (comp.lang.python)
  • Re: ``Whom rule
    ... If he intends to use 'whom', it should be 'whom to hate, whom to ... He picks ``who'' to avoid pedanticism. ... natural language wants ``who.'' ... There's no point in trying to confuse Ron Hardin with facts. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Natural Language Praised
    ... Ron Hardin wrote: ... > Somebody has this as their .sig ... > "Natural language has evolved to the present point in a way optimally to ... the problem is that each language is infinite so that a single linguist ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: The suppressed term of negation
    ... The significance of action of a negation will not be found in any mooted ... expressions in natural language. ... In type theory 'not' is an expression of type ... of type t (type t expressions are truth valuable statements) results ...
    (sci.logic)