Rich and John, (01)
I'm confused by the sentences and by John's combination.
The use of "the" as the declarative indicates to me that
there is one water fountain. I assume (abduction) that they
are going to drink or that Wanda is going to hold the faucet
while Paul drinks, or vice versa. Without a temporal element
or an explanation of cooperative action it seems to be a
problem of sparse data and the logic is unclear or is is to
be assumed. (02)
-John Bottoms
FirstStar
Concord, MA
T: 978-505-9878 (03)
John F. Sowa wrote: (04)
> Rich,
>
> I changed the subject line to indicate a switch to a much narrower
> discussion that the Semantic Systems thread.
>
> RC> I see it as two disjuncts:
> >
> > 1. Paul goes to the water fountain;
> >
> > 2. Wanda goes to the water fountain;
>
> Whenever you can paraphrase something with the word 'and', you
> have a conjunction. If you need the word 'or', it's a disjunction.
>
> In this example, you could paraphrase a list of those two sentences
> as "Paul goes to the water function, and Wanda goes to the water fountain."
>
> There is no implication that they both went together or separately.
> In fact, the operator & in FOL obeys the following two inference
> rules (using the turnstile operator '|-' to mean 'is provable from'):
>
> p, q |- p&q
>
> p&q |- p, q
>
> RC> I don't think that Paul and Wanda have anything else going...
>
> Combining two sentences in English or any notation for FOL into
> a compound sentence connected by 'and' has no additional
> implications beyond what is implied by stating them separately.
>
> In case of an English narrative, there might be an implicit
> 'and then' between the sentences. But the compound sentence
> "p, and then q" implies "p and q".
>
> However, I will admit that the following sentence is ambiguous:
>
> Paul and Wanda went to the water fountain.
>
> This sentence suggests, but does not imply that they went
> together. But in the following context, there is no such
> implication:
>
> Q: Did anybody in the department go to the water fountain?
>
> A: Paul and Wanda did.
>
> In any case, none of these paraphrases used the word 'or'.
>
> John
>
>
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> (05)
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