army1987 comments on Standard and Nonstandard Numbers - Less Wrong

31 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 20 December 2012 03:23AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 02:22:53AM 0 points [-]

I read that "any" as "for at least one", rather than as "for every".

Probably it's because of the “no group” before it; cf “I can do anything” and “I can't do anything”. Negations and quantifiers in English sometimes interact in weird ways, making it non-trivial to get the semantics from the syntax.

Comment author: Bobertron 22 December 2012 03:12:22PM 0 points [-]

Wiktionary gives the meanings "at least one" and "no matter what kind". The first likely doesn't apply here, as it's not used in a negation or question. To interpret "no matter what kind" to mean "every" seems like a stretch to me. I really do think the meaning of "any" is ambiguous here. "any" just specifies that we don't have any further constraints on x. You could replace it with "every" or "at least one", but not with "every even" or "at least one even", as that would introduce a new constraint.

Comment author: [deleted] 22 December 2012 04:50:00PM 0 points [-]

The first likely doesn't apply here, as it's not used in a negation or question.

It doesn't, but I was hypothesizing that the reason why on the first read it sounded to you as though it did was the negation (“no group”) before it.