Re: Potential Things

george wrote:
George Dance wrote:
Torkel's explanation doesn't hold up. People are perfectly capable of
imagining, encountering, calculating, and reasoning about existents of
which Ex(Px -> Qx) is non-vacuously true,

That is not at all the point.
In the first place, people are not PERFECTLY
capable of doing much of anything. To err is human.

Oh, don't play word games: I didn't say that people were capable of
reasoning, etc., perfectly; I said that they were perfectly capable of
reasoning, etc.

OTOH, if you weren't playing a word game, but just misunderstood the
statement - that's some evidence for my background thesis; that there
are advantages to translating ordinary language arguments into symbolic
logic, but only if the translations are correct.

Torkel's point was that people (especially you) are
prone to MAKE MISTAKES in reasoning about these
existents.

No, his explicit point was that they make mistakes in translating those
statements into first-order wff - something that I agree with - coupled
with an explanation of why they do - something I don't agree with at
all. He did not say that they make mistakes in their day-too-day or
"informal" reasoning; in fact, he seemed at times to deny that anyone
made any mistakes in their "informal" reasoning - certainly none that
formalizing it (ie, translating their statements into statements of a
formal logic) could do anything to mitigate.

Or to mistake existents about which
Px->Qx IS FALSE for ones about which it is true.

No he did not; he just pointed to Ex(Px -> Qx) as a mistranslation of
"Some P is Q", and used that as an example to show the alleged power of
logic to bewitch and confuse.

Or, far more frequently, the converse.
In natural language P implies Q connotes a CAUSAL
relationship.

Nonsense. "If the newspaper is on the doorstep, the paper boy has
already come." is an implication statement in ordinary language - one
which does not imply that the newspaper CAUSED the paper boy to come.

Material implication is NOT like that.

Who suggested it was?

So Torkel did not get anything wrong here.

Including his point that I've actually challenged: that there are no
(non-vacuous) ordinary language expressions that can be translated into
first-order logic as Ex(Px -> Qx)?

You are just making yourself look stupid.

Hmmm... you snip what Torkel says, and give us a paraphrase of yours
that's completely wrong; follow that by snipping some of my comments
and paraphrasing them in a way that's completely wrong - the
implication being either that you didn't understand what either of us
said, or you're trying to get away with misstatements - and you think
that makes me look stupid?

You would look even more stupid if you were
to actually pick some reasonable verbs for P and Q.

P and Q are not 'verbs.' P and Q are predicates. Predicates
correspond, in ordinary language, to descriptions. Descriptions are
not verbs.

Let's let the x's be people.

Go for it.

What do you mean?

.

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