4 ms·
> Once they understand the specific, then its time to make it abstract: take what they now understand and generalize it - say from people, to predicates in gene
by ken 8y ago
> Once they understand the specific, then its time to make it abstract: take what they now understand and generalize it - say from people, to predicates in general.
What does "!Bob" mean, though? Are we negating the person, or their name? Neither one makes sense to me.
Maybe I'm too far gone down the computer science rabbit hole, but this is far more confusing to me than "!a".
- all2 8y ago> Are we negating the person, or their name? Neither one makes sense to me. This is a fair statement. I think a treatment of predicates would be necessary before getting to using names as predicates. "When we say 'Bob', we mean 'Bob has enough money for a bus fare'." Then, if we want to say "Bob doesn't have enough money for a bus fare" we can express it with !Bob (which means, in this case 'not Bob'). I agree that using names can be confusing. I think meaning needs to be addressed first.
- Izkata 8y agoI don't think you really need to take a detour into discussing meaning if you used meaningful names for the construct, though. For example, since here we're talking about a boolean expression, name the variables like you would boooleans - such as "isBob".