Vaniver comments on The Universal Medical Journal Article Error - Less Wrong

6 Post author: PhilGoetz 29 April 2014 05:57PM

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Comment author: Vaniver 06 April 2013 05:40:35PM *  1 point [-]

First, we start with the symbolic statement:

!∀x∃y P(x,y)

Next, we replace the variables with English names:

!∀black thing ∃ raven-nature

Next, we replace the symbols with English phrases:

Not every black thing has raven-nature

Then we clean up the English:

Not every black thing is a raven.

We can repeat the process with the other sentence, being careful to use the same words when we replace the variables:

∀x∃y !P(x,y)

becomes

∀black thing ∃ not-raven-nature

becomes

All black things have not-raven-nature

and finally:

Every black thing is not a raven.

(I should note that my English interpretation of ∃y P(x,y) is probably a bit different and more compact than PhilGoetz's, but I think that's a linguistic rather than logical difference.)

Comment author: PhilGoetz 06 April 2013 08:33:28PM *  3 points [-]

You certainly gave me the most-favorable interpretation. But I just goofed. I fixed it above. This is what I was thinking, but my mind wanted to put "black(x)" in there because that's what you do with ravens in symbolic logic.

A) Not everything is a raven: !∀x raven(x)

B) Everything is not a raven: ∀x !raven(x)

Comment author: Vaniver 07 April 2013 02:15:26AM 2 points [-]

The new version is much clearer. My interpretation of the old version was that y was something like "attribute," so you could say "Not every black thing has being a raven as one of its attributes" or "for every black thing, it does not have an attribute which is being a raven." Both of those are fairly torturous sentences in English but the logic looks the same.

Comment author: Morendil 06 April 2013 10:48:18PM *  0 points [-]

!∀black thing ∃ raven-nature

That's where I don't follow. I read the original sentence as "for every x there is an y such that the relationship P obtains between x and y". I'm OK with your assigning "black things" to x but "raven-nature" needs explanation; I don't see how to parse it as a relationship between two things previously introduced.

The edited version makes more sense to me now.