At 5:21 PM -0500 2/1/08, Ed Barkmeyer wrote:
>
>Nor is it good for anything. Is it clear that "a tulip is a flower"
>means "every tulip is a flower"? I seem to recall that 19th century
>logicians spent a great deal of time arguing about this. A search on
>"tulips are flowers" gets only 724 hits, while "flowers are tulips" gets
>2700! Note also that one gets only 1 hit on "every tulip is a flower",
>and that is from a logic text. "All tulips are flowers" gets 8 hits,
>but "all flowers are tulips" gets 6! Out of context, the Web is
>seriously misinformed (to say nothing of in-context misinformation
>promulgated by the ignorant). (01)
One of the notorious inabilities of matching and statistical
techniques is the proper handling of negation and quantification
words. The sentences "all tulips are flowers" and "not all tulips are
flowers" have opposite meanings, but will both match the pattern
"tulips are flowers"; as indeed will "some tulips are flowers" as in
"some tulips are flowers which demonstrate the dangers of
over-breeding". I leave the reader to invent (or find) similar
examples. (02)
Pat
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