3 ms·

> in typical English you are making an existence statement No, you're not.

scoofy 2y ago
Oh boy... so I actually wrote a thesis in graduate school on conversational implicature, Paul Grice, and various other theories of implying things. I would actually agree user dwheeler here. Whether or not you agree with Gricean implicature theory (I do not), the point is that making a claim about a group that doesn't exist is absurd. Absurd statements do not convey meaning, and language is a tool for communication, thus it is generally an assumed axiom that statements will have meaning. Here, even when people make borderline nonsensical statements, we assume there is a metaphor or language game involved. So, by making a statement about 'all my hats', if the number of hats you have is zero, then any predication is absurd and the statement is absurd, so given an axiom of not making absurd statements for natural language, you can assume there are at least two hats. Obviously there are no formal rules here, but the functionality of natural language demonstrates that these heuristics exist. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/
- tantalor 2y ago
  Granted all that, but we're not really talking about normal everyday English, but a hypothetical conversation with some mythical entity who can only lie, which is not really a capability of humans; even the most pathological liar among us can and will tell the truth. So I'd put all that theory in a drawer somewhere and acknowledge that, when we're talking about logic puzzles, the rules of logic are paramount, not grammar.
  - LudwigNagasena 2y ago
    Sure, if your main use of formal logic is to while away the time doing vacuous puzzles.
  - scoofy 2y ago
    As I said in a previous part of this thread, the rules of logic are as arbitrary (by definition) as they are paramount, and often diverge from natural language logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365222#42368661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365222#42368661 --- I mean, it's important to remember that the axioms of first-order logic are arbitrary. We could easily argue that the truth value of an empty group is undecidable, and that would better correlate to natural language logic. The fact that we compact these edge cases into arbitrary truth values is just for ease of computing. This is also relevant to the arbitrary choice of the 'inclusive or' as a default over an 'exclusive or', which most people use in natural language.
    - foxglacier 2y ago
      This addresses my previous reply to you, thanks. I wonder though if there's a problem in that common natural language is inherently limited to common concepts. Scientists famously use confusing language in their papers but they're writing for people who use the same language so it's OK. For example, they use "consistent with zero" to mean "might be zero" even though a common-language reader can interpret it as "not zero". I suppose logicians use "or" to mean inclusive or in their papers too.
- 8note 2y ago
  absurd statements are usually jokes a joke > "all my hats are green" - bill > "but green hats catch fire in the sunlight" - joe > "and thats why i dont have any hats" - bill from the link: > Many conversations have goals other than the exchange of information. One is amusement, which speakers often pursue by making jokes (Lepore & Stone 2015: §11.3). Because the goal is not to provide information, the maxims of Quality, Quantity, and Relation do not apply. If for any of these reasons the Cooperative Principle does not apply, reasoning based on it will be unsound. i think i disagree - the joke is intended to say that bill doesnt have any hats, but would like one, and only a green one, and only if they didnt catch fire in the sunlight
  - scoofy 2y ago
    This is why I point out that an absurd statement still points toward meaning via a metaphor or language game, which I would put wordplay/jokes under the rubric of. In fact, in my thesis, I cited The Naked Jape, by Jimmy Carr specifically in reference to jokes (it has a one-liner on every page). On of my main arguments against Gricean conversational implicature theory was that the theory itself was a form of begging the question or no true scotsman problems, in that all of the obvious examples where a counter-factual to the cooperation principal that exist everywhere are excused as "not conversation." https://archive.org/details/nakedjapeuncover0000carr https://archive.org/details/nakedjapeuncover0000carr Again, yes, you can have wordplay, but wordplay is wordplay, and is a language game that exists and is trying to do something in a different framework. The reason why so many folks have no issue with the puzzle is that they view it as a puzzle (a kind of language game), and not a sensible human communication. This lets them genuinely consider absurd statements and treat them as normal.
- foxglacier 2y ago
  Is "absurd" a term of art here, or you just mean it conflicts with common intuition? This sort of thing comes up a lot in programming languages. For example, is Null=Null true or false? What about Null!=Null? Maybe they can both be true or both false. It's strange because there's no simple obvious right answer but we need some answer and programming languages manage to define that sort of thing so it ends up logically consistent. Closer to this topic, how about a typed collection with no item in it? We expect the type system to enforce "all its items are green" but when it's empty, that constraint would become absurd and we can no longer pass an empty collection to a function that requires a collection of greens? A simple program to test "all my hats are green" allows the empty set to be all green: AllGreen = True For each hat in MyHats: If hat <> green: AllGreen = False
  - scoofy 2y ago
    I'll add the exchange back here to continue this thread ----- >>scoofy: I mean, it's important to remember that the axioms of first-order logic are arbitrary. We could easily argue that the truth value of an empty group is undecidable, and that would better correlate to natural language logic. The fact that we compact these edge cases into arbitrary truth values is just for ease of computing. This is also relevant to the arbitrary choice of the 'inclusive or' as a default over an 'exclusive or', which most people use in natural language. --- >foxglacier: This addresses my previous reply to you, thanks. I wonder though if there's a problem in that common natural language is inherently limited to common concepts. Scientists famously use confusing language in their papers but they're writing for people who use the same language so it's OK. For example, they use "consistent with zero" to mean "might be zero" even though a common-language reader can interpret it as "not zero". I suppose logicians use "or" to mean inclusive or in their papers too. ----- "Absurd" here I wouldn't say is a term of art. I just mean things that not only don't mean anything, but can't mean anything. Here, existence is always extremely relevant. This goes back to Kant's idea that existence can't/shouldn't be a predicate. The idea of talking about the actual color of a nonexistent hat is absurd in that a nonexistent hat can not have a color, period, because having a color presumes existence. So, when I talk about the logic of natural language, we have to get really philosophical. I presume that there as at least significant equivalence from formal logic to natural language, if not ultimately being fully equivalent. Formal logic is effectively a model trying to capture logical reasoning, and there are some notable differences for simplicity's sake (the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis is a common example: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-4780-1_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-4780-1_... ), however, most-if-not-all of these formal logic ambiguity concerns are trivial for natural language to deal with as any ambiguity can be clarified by an interlocutor. Where things get really weird, however, is as you go up to the axioms of logic, and try to justify them. The idea that foundations of logic itself is determined either inductively or instinctually is just bizarre. And mapping an inductive/instinctual logic to a formal system runs into a lot of philosophical problems that aren't really practical to worry about. It just gets weird and solipsistic, as it does when you get too caught up in philosophy.

Oh boy... so I actually wrote a thesis in graduate school on conversational implicature, Paul Grice, and various other theories of implying things. I would actually agree user dwheeler here. Whether or not you agree with Gricean implicature theory (I do not), the point is that making a claim about a group that doesn't exist is absurd. Absurd statements do not convey meaning, and language is a tool for communication, thus it is generally an assumed axiom that statements will have meaning. Here, even when people make borderline nonsensical statements, we assume there is a metaphor or language game involved. So, by making a statement about 'all my hats', if the number of hats you have is zero, then any predication is absurd and the statement is absurd, so given an axiom of not making absurd statements for natural language, you can assume there are at least two hats. Obviously there are no formal rules here, but the functionality of natural language demonstrates that these heuristics exist. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/

tantalor 2y ago
Granted all that, but we're not really talking about normal everyday English, but a hypothetical conversation with some mythical entity who can only lie, which is not really a capability of humans; even the most pathological liar among us can and will tell the truth. So I'd put all that theory in a drawer somewhere and acknowledge that, when we're talking about logic puzzles, the rules of logic are paramount, not grammar.
- LudwigNagasena 2y ago
  Sure, if your main use of formal logic is to while away the time doing vacuous puzzles.
- scoofy 2y ago
  As I said in a previous part of this thread, the rules of logic are as arbitrary (by definition) as they are paramount, and often diverge from natural language logic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365222#42368661 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42365222#42368661 --- I mean, it's important to remember that the axioms of first-order logic are arbitrary. We could easily argue that the truth value of an empty group is undecidable, and that would better correlate to natural language logic. The fact that we compact these edge cases into arbitrary truth values is just for ease of computing. This is also relevant to the arbitrary choice of the 'inclusive or' as a default over an 'exclusive or', which most people use in natural language.
  - foxglacier 2y ago
    This addresses my previous reply to you, thanks. I wonder though if there's a problem in that common natural language is inherently limited to common concepts. Scientists famously use confusing language in their papers but they're writing for people who use the same language so it's OK. For example, they use "consistent with zero" to mean "might be zero" even though a common-language reader can interpret it as "not zero". I suppose logicians use "or" to mean inclusive or in their papers too.
8note 2y ago
absurd statements are usually jokes a joke > "all my hats are green" - bill > "but green hats catch fire in the sunlight" - joe > "and thats why i dont have any hats" - bill from the link: > Many conversations have goals other than the exchange of information. One is amusement, which speakers often pursue by making jokes (Lepore & Stone 2015: §11.3). Because the goal is not to provide information, the maxims of Quality, Quantity, and Relation do not apply. If for any of these reasons the Cooperative Principle does not apply, reasoning based on it will be unsound. i think i disagree - the joke is intended to say that bill doesnt have any hats, but would like one, and only a green one, and only if they didnt catch fire in the sunlight
- scoofy 2y ago
  This is why I point out that an absurd statement still points toward meaning via a metaphor or language game, which I would put wordplay/jokes under the rubric of. In fact, in my thesis, I cited The Naked Jape, by Jimmy Carr specifically in reference to jokes (it has a one-liner on every page). On of my main arguments against Gricean conversational implicature theory was that the theory itself was a form of begging the question or no true scotsman problems, in that all of the obvious examples where a counter-factual to the cooperation principal that exist everywhere are excused as "not conversation." https://archive.org/details/nakedjapeuncover0000carr https://archive.org/details/nakedjapeuncover0000carr Again, yes, you can have wordplay, but wordplay is wordplay, and is a language game that exists and is trying to do something in a different framework. The reason why so many folks have no issue with the puzzle is that they view it as a puzzle (a kind of language game), and not a sensible human communication. This lets them genuinely consider absurd statements and treat them as normal.
foxglacier 2y ago
Is "absurd" a term of art here, or you just mean it conflicts with common intuition? This sort of thing comes up a lot in programming languages. For example, is Null=Null true or false? What about Null!=Null? Maybe they can both be true or both false. It's strange because there's no simple obvious right answer but we need some answer and programming languages manage to define that sort of thing so it ends up logically consistent. Closer to this topic, how about a typed collection with no item in it? We expect the type system to enforce "all its items are green" but when it's empty, that constraint would become absurd and we can no longer pass an empty collection to a function that requires a collection of greens? A simple program to test "all my hats are green" allows the empty set to be all green: AllGreen = True For each hat in MyHats: If hat <> green: AllGreen = False
- scoofy 2y ago
  I'll add the exchange back here to continue this thread ----- >>scoofy: I mean, it's important to remember that the axioms of first-order logic are arbitrary. We could easily argue that the truth value of an empty group is undecidable, and that would better correlate to natural language logic. The fact that we compact these edge cases into arbitrary truth values is just for ease of computing. This is also relevant to the arbitrary choice of the 'inclusive or' as a default over an 'exclusive or', which most people use in natural language. --- >foxglacier: This addresses my previous reply to you, thanks. I wonder though if there's a problem in that common natural language is inherently limited to common concepts. Scientists famously use confusing language in their papers but they're writing for people who use the same language so it's OK. For example, they use "consistent with zero" to mean "might be zero" even though a common-language reader can interpret it as "not zero". I suppose logicians use "or" to mean inclusive or in their papers too. ----- "Absurd" here I wouldn't say is a term of art. I just mean things that not only don't mean anything, but can't mean anything. Here, existence is always extremely relevant. This goes back to Kant's idea that existence can't/shouldn't be a predicate. The idea of talking about the actual color of a nonexistent hat is absurd in that a nonexistent hat can not have a color, period, because having a color presumes existence. So, when I talk about the logic of natural language, we have to get really philosophical. I presume that there as at least significant equivalence from formal logic to natural language, if not ultimately being fully equivalent. Formal logic is effectively a model trying to capture logical reasoning, and there are some notable differences for simplicity's sake (the Frege-Russell ambiguity thesis is a common example: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-4780-1_11 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-009-4780-1_... ), however, most-if-not-all of these formal logic ambiguity concerns are trivial for natural language to deal with as any ambiguity can be clarified by an interlocutor. Where things get really weird, however, is as you go up to the axioms of logic, and try to justify them. The idea that foundations of logic itself is determined either inductively or instinctually is just bizarre. And mapping an inductive/instinctual logic to a formal system runs into a lot of philosophical problems that aren't really practical to worry about. It just gets weird and solipsistic, as it does when you get too caught up in philosophy.