Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is • Hacker News Board

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#31

Post by throwaway743 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:13 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #17

nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."

Random, but this made me think of the Big Daddy Kane line, "When my pen hits the paper, ahh shit".

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#32

Post by nerevarthelame » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:25 AM UTC

sawaruna wrote: post #29

Forgive the dumb question but what is False about ‘∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x)’

I think it's a poor example, because whether or not an eggplant is considered a fruit depends on your perspective and context. It is a fruit botanically, but it is not typically considered or used as one for culinary purposes.

That distinction of ambiguity adds an interesting complexity to "meaningness," but I agree that it's confusing in relationship to the rest of this specific article.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#33

Post by pirocks » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:32 AM UTC

sawaruna wrote: post #29

Forgive the dumb question but what is False about ‘∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x)’

Technically it is a fruit but its like tomatoes where lots of people say its a vegetable anyway.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#34

Post by Dylan16807 » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 3:48 AM UTC

avindroth wrote: post #13

One of the most influential philosophical concepts for me from the last decade was from this very blog called “Nebulosity”. It just speaks to the nature of reality that is misinterpreted with overlays of meaning. - ‘Nebulosity’ refers to the insubstantial, amorphous, non-separable, transient, ambiguous nature of meaningness. From a distance, clouds can look solid; close-up they are mere fog, which can even be so thin…

I agree with most of that.

But if you're measuring at least a small distance from yourself, it's pretty easy to say if any cloud exists or not in a particular area.

It's like asking whether you have any grains of sand. Much easier than asking if you have enough to make a pile.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#35

Post by sawaruna » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 4:33 AM UTC

nerevarthelame wrote: post #32

sawaruna wrote: post #29

Forgive the dumb question but what is False about ‘∀x eggplant(x) ⇒ fruit(x)’

I think it's a poor example, because whether or not an eggplant is considered a fruit depends on your perspective and context. It is a fruit botanically, but it is not typically considered or used as one for culinary purposes. That distinction of ambiguity adds an interesting complexity to "meaningness," but I agree that it's confusing in relationship to the rest of this specific article.

Alright, that was the only thing I could thing of that would cause my confusion here. I viewed it simply as 'it's False to say all eggplants are fruits' but I guess the author's intention was 'because people consider eggplants to be culinarily a vegetable, saying all eggplants are fruits is False'.

It's an interesting addition to the disgusting about meaning in linguistics, but according to formal logic as used by linguistics, is the eggplant example even correct? It seems as though no matter what, 'an eggplant is a fruit' is True, and perhaps there is a different logical notation to imply it could be considered otherwise depending on context.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#36

Post by praptak » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:02 AM UTC

dariusj18 wrote: post #8

nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

Also, the basis of a lot of humor is when the opposite of what you expect is what is intended.

"When I take the shoe out of the fire, I’ll lay it on the anvil. When I nod my head, you hit it with the hammer." comes to mind

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#37

Post by guerrilla » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:03 AM UTC

Frege did not in general reject intuition. The rules of what became first-order logic are accepted on the grounds that they are intuitively undeniable and provide the results we need. That's the actual lesson of Russel's paradox in response to Basic Law V: that blatantly obvious things can be problematic.

For anyone interested in the semantic analysis of the verb "to be", I recommend Andrea Moro's book "A Brief History of the Verb To Be."

Also note that analytic philosophy is the philosophical tradition the author is referring to, not rationalism [2]. This is an ahistorical use of the latter word. They did define their terms in the glossary but that won't help you in searching.

[1]. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy

[2]. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rationalism-empiricism/

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#38

Post by WalterBright » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:14 AM UTC

adrianmonk wrote: post #7

clairity wrote: post #2

bill clinton, is that you?! but seriously, in contrast to natural language, the article lays out the basics of mathematically-based logic, not for its own accord, but as groundwork for the more interesting later sections talking about context-dependence and reasonableness. the reason natural language has so much ambiguity is not because our brains couldn't have come up with a rigorously logical language, but because…

Also time constraints. It's possible to be much more precise even with informal language, but it would take forever. So, for efficiency, words don't really deliver an idea to the listener. Instead, it's assumed that the listener is working toward the idea through their own reasoning, and words fill in only the necessary gaps to help them get there or to help them get there more quickly. You more or less reverse engin…

Poul Anderson in "Brain Wave" had a most interesting take on what increased intelligence would look like. People said less and less to each other, but conveyed more meaning.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#39

Post by roenxi » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:18 AM UTC

baddox wrote: post #17

nojs wrote: post #6

It’s interesting to think how fundamentally impossible it is to parse a sentence without a background corpus of knowledge about the world: > I dropped the hammer on the table and it smashed > I dropped the vase on the table and it smashed Exact same grammatical structure but if you switch the noun the way you parse the sentence changes. This is why machine learning with huge datasets wins in NLP, translation etc.

And I wonder how you parse, let's say, "I dropped the pencil on the table and it smashed."

In that context smashed probably takes on a different meaning as a sound, and the sentence semantics are equivalent to "the pen clattered loudly on the table". Similar to how the word would work if someone talked about "the smash of cymbals". It would be an awkward sentence though.

Re: Depends upon what the meaning of the word “is” is

#40

Post by sdigital » Sat, Aug 08, 2020, 5:23 AM UTC

mynegation wrote: post #21

English is a language with pretty reduced inflection mechanisms and overloaded word meanings. Translated into Russian you would be forced to use different builds for different meanings: “St. trinian’s is a pretty (in female gender, nominative case) school for little (in female gender, genitive case) girls” or “St. Trinian’s is a school for pretty little (both female gender, genitive case) girls”.

It's true that languages with case declensions (beyond the vestigial declined pronoun forms in English) would be less ambiguous in expressing that example sentence.

English is an analytic language, meaning that more information is conveyed through syntactic patterning involving closed classes of words like particles, prepositions, and articles. These words could be considered "overloaded" as you said, but for non-closed classes of words though, as far as I know English is not known to be more or less polysemic than other languages.