On Sun, August 7, 2011 10:31, John F. Sowa said:
> ...
> DF
>> RULE: bachelor(X) => unmarried(X)
>> GIVEN: unmarried(Benedict)
>> does not imply
>> ?: bachelor(Benedict)
>
> But the definition of 'bachelor' as 'unmarried man' ... (01)
You did not give that definition. In fact, you questioned its
validity -- as i agreed to and you highlight below. You suggested that
priests committed to not marrying would not be considered by the general
population as bachelors. (02)
> means that the rule should have a double-headed arrow. (03)
only if the rule had a conjoined second condition, man(X). (04)
> In any case, even
> the one-way rule above is sufficient to prove the following: (05)
> "If Benedict is a bachelor, then Benedict is unmarried." (06)
Of course. (07)
> DF
>> FWIW, celibacy applies to clergy in the Roman Catholic Church,
>> but not for clergy in other Catholic Churches of which the
>> Pope is head. (08)
> Yes. But that just adds one more complication that emphasizes
> the following point: (09)
> DF
>> It seems that the rule for bachelorhood needs to be more complex than
>> such unmarried(X) & man(X) => bachelor(X) . (010)
> JFS
>>> Instead, my recommendation is to use an underspecified
>>> collection of terms with very few axioms. For detailed
>>> reasoning about specific problems, use those terms in an
>>> open-ended collection of small theories (microtheories),
>>> each of which is specialized for a narrow domain.
>
> DF
>> I agree.
>
> That's the most important point I'd like to emphasize. (011)
The utility of microtheories is not only that conditions of the
context can be assumed and thus not be required as conditions that
must be added to rules, but that massive numbers of rules which
are applicable to other microtheories would not be visible to the
inference engine, simplifying search if one or more conditions of
an irrelevant rule happen to match statements in the given context. (012)
> The reason why I chose the example 'bachelor' is that it was
> one that Carnap used in his book (which I browsed through when
> I recommended it as a good introduction). (013)
If Carnap accepted the meaning of "bachelor" as "ummarried man",
then he should not be uncomfortable considering a priest, a widower,
or a man cohabiting with his common-law wife and their shared children
as "bachelors". If he were uncomfortable with conclusions, he should
have been uncomfortable with the definition. (014)
-- doug f (015)
> ...
> John (016)
=============================================================
doug foxvog doug@xxxxxxxxxx http://ProgressiveAustin.org (017)
"I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great
initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours."
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
============================================================= (018)
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