Dear Log,
I heard this on a public service announcement on TV the other day:
"Television is for everyone, but every show isn't. So check out what your kids are watching; you know them better than anyone."For extra credit, translate the above into predicate logic notation. And yes, this will be on the test.
Re:PL
TorgoX on 2002-06-09T01:25:34
Very good! I particularly like how you notated what the TV copy-writer meant (there's some shows that aren't for some people), instead of what he said (every show is not for everyone -- i.e., every show has people that it's not for; or: "for" doesn't describe the relationship between every show and everybody -- so maybe some shows are AGAINST everyone, or BY everyone, etc.)I'm not sure what to do about the plurality on "kids" tho -- there's a reading where everyone being addressed has several children each; but there's other readings.
And strictly speaking, you miss pointing out that "you" refers to personB and personC, but we'll take that as a given. And you assume that "you" menas exactly two parents -- but it's possible that it means less, or more, which may or may not be all the parents of "your kids" -- so that the "anyone" in "you know them better than anyone" could include the kids' other parents, who aren't included in "you".
But you didn't catch the existential presupposition in "You know [your kids] better than anyone" -- i.e., that you DO have kids. But then, I don't recall how predicate notation deals with presuppositions versus actual assertions.
Interesting that you turned "[the medium of] television [on the whole]" into "all televisions", tho.
Incidentally, the treatment of "knows better" in true PRED(arg,arg,...) notation is somewhat tricky, since it's both an adverb and a comparative.
Now I have a headache, and I need a nap!
BTW, your seekrit prize pak consists of me now telling you that HTML4 adds the not-yet-well-supported entities ∀ and ∃, beside the older ¬
Re:PL
wickline on 2002-06-09T13:42:34
> I'm not sure what to do about the plurality on "kids"
hmmm...
Maybe it should be read as something like for each
personA, for each personB if personB is a kid of personA
....
> that "you" refers to personB and personC
another item for the conjunctive chain... but then that
gives you a slopy bit of PL. Some folks would read it
and have it come up false, while otherw sould have it
come up true, which ties into your comment
> i.e., that you DO have kids
which could be addressed by something like the above
where you say for each person who is one of your kids
which accomodates zero-to-n kids.
> you assume that "you" menas exactly two parents
and could also take care of that, since we'd be going
from the one person to all of their kids (possibly all
zero of their kids) instead of from the kid to their
however-many parents.
> television [on the whole]" into "all televisions"
more laziness.:) I started off thinking in the same
terms as the author, but then got all gnarled up in
too many layers of refinement and just said "fuck it"
and did physical tvs instead. The author doesn't want
to say that everything about "the medium of television"
is for everyone, but rather that for some folks, some
aspect of it is not for them. But maybe it's not really
some aspect which they find so problematic, but a
collection of individual bits which separately are
tollerable, but together really make the medium suck
for that person (and the bits could be different per
each person)....and maybe the bits are still ok with
that person when taken all together, but only within
certain contexts (WTC coverage can have footage of
violence and gore, but cartoons can't).
So I took the easy way out. It's just for fun:)
> "knows better" in true PRED(arg,arg,...)
The easiest way would seem to be to make it a 3-arg
predicate. If you wanted to get fancy, you could use
a higher-order predicate calculus (which can take as
args other predicates). Then you've got the predicate
of x_knows_y(_,_), and the higher-order predicate
x_does_P_better_than_y(_,_,_).
> seekrit prize pak
gracias!:)
I'll have to use this prize in another context, as I
have vowed to post in 'Code' at use.perl.org since
I'm too lazy to use 'Preview' regularly, and this got
me in trouble when trying to post about perl6-flavored
regex syntax.
-matt
who thinks modal logic is a silly special case of
higher-order predicate logic, not worth most of the
man-hours folks have spent writting about it.Re:PL
pudge on 2002-06-09T02:28:39
As with the original, it claims that parents know their kids better than those kids know themselves.
Until the kids are teenagers, this is almost always the case. When the kids are teenagers, this is often the case (that is, it should be the case, most of the time, if the parents are doing their job).
Re:PL
wickline on 2002-06-09T13:17:11
and if it's still true by the time the kids hit 30,
they *really* need to move out and get their own place!
;)
-matt
