SUO: Mutual Admiration Society
>> [Awbrey]
>> It has disserved students and society for a hundred years now to keep
>> selling them a degraded concrete syntax that renders them incapable
>> of tackling any significant problem that logic might be called on
>> to help with, all the while vaunting themselves to such heights
>> of delusion in their imaginary powers to "express", after the
>> fact, the things that others have had to sweat it out to
>> discover by almost any other means possible. The only
>> kind of necessary condition that you are talking about
>> here is the necessary end of an insufficient means.
>
>
> [Sowa]
> I agree. That notation, with some minor modifications by Peano,
> was Peirce's first method for representing all of first-order
> logic. He later discovered a far better system, which he called
> his "chef d'oeuvre", and which I have been teaching and preaching
> to students for over 20 years.
>
> Whenever I show people Peirce's EGs, they ask "Why didn't they teach
> us logic this way in college?" And I have to answer that their poor
> benighted teachers had never read the literature of their own specialty.
> There is an enormous gulf of ignorance out there, and somehow, one has
> to bring people from where they are to a higher plane of consciousness.
> But all teaching of any kind must start at the point, for better or
> worse, where the students happen to be.
Folks,
A couple of comments:
JA, you are simply mistaken if you think that syntax has any impact on the
ability of ATP systems to solve problems. I can't think of any real ATP
system that pays any attention to the input syntax once the parse of the
problem set is done with.
JS, you can't claim to be doing the right thing with CL on one hand and then
turn around and somehow EGS are a "better" system in any but a pedagogical
sense. You have told me in person several times that they are just an
alternative syntax for FOL, so it can't be "better" in any way that counts
for ATP.
.bill