Vaniver comments on The Universal Medical Journal Article Error - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (189)
First, we start with the symbolic statement:
Next, we replace the variables with English names:
Next, we replace the symbols with English phrases:
Then we clean up the English:
We can repeat the process with the other sentence, being careful to use the same words when we replace the variables:
becomes
becomes
and finally:
(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.)
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)
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.
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.