SUO: Re: Critique Of Non-Functional Reason
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| A. Automated Reasoning (AR)
|
| The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference
| to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
| B. Inter-Operability (IO)
|
| The standard will provide a basis for achieving Inter-Operability
| among various software and database applications.
[A]
I beg your indulgence to allow me to copy out just a few more
of these "thoroughly unimpressive truisms" (TUT's) from fables
that you no doubt absorbed into your unconsciousness as a child,
for I have found, on more or less mature reflection, that these
truisms are mostly predicable on the controversies that ensue
when they are read aloud in fine and public places like this,
moreso when their consequences are traced to the bitter end.
| Chapter 1. Statements
|
| Section 5. Statements About Statements (cont.)
|
| In order to say that two objects stand in a given relation,
| e.g. hate, or remoteness, one puts an appropriate binary
| predicate (transitive verb) between names of the objects thus:
| "Roosevelt hates Hitler", "Berlin is far from Washington".
| To say that two statements stand in a given relation, whether
| the phonetic relation of rhyming or the semantic relation of
| implication, we put the appropriate binary predicate between
| names of the statements -- not between the statements themselves.
| We may write:
|
| 9. "All men are mortal" implies "all white men are mortal",
|
| 10. The third statement of the book implies the seventh,
|
| but never:
|
| 11. All men are mortal implies all white men are mortal,
|
| on the analogy of:
|
| 12. If all men are mortal then all white men are mortal,
|
| 13. All men are mortal => all white men are mortal.
|
| The verb "implies" belongs between names of statements precisely because,
| unlike "=>" or "if-then", it expresses a relation between statements;
| it is a binary predicate by means of which we talk 'about' statements.
| (9) and (10) are about statements, while (12) and (13) are about men.
|
| Quine, 'Mathematical Logic', page 28.
|
| Willard Van Orman Quine,
|'Mathematical Logic', Revised Edition,
| Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
| 1940, 1951, 1981.
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