[FOM] Follow-up to Tennant

Neil Tennant neilt at mercutio.cohums.ohio-state.edu
Wed Feb 19 15:24:00 EST 2003


On Mon, 17 Feb 2003, Ross A. Finlayson wrote:

> I would think about this in the computer science or linguistic way where 
> there are certain operations that can be applied to both of those two 
> things with the same results.  Then, depending upon what type those two 
> nearly equal things are said to subsume, they may be almost equivalent.  
> For calling the two nouns A and B, then the element with the highest 
> value of both A and B is 100.  A and B each have an element of operator 
> with the for-any-element, for-each-element, and for-all-elements.  They 
> almost exactly refer to the same thing, and may be considered to be the 
> same thing.  Each describes the collection of any and all numbers where 
> the value of the number is between one and a hundred.
> 
> I approach the logic in a similar way as Dean has professed in 
> preferring mechanisms that are easily explicable in plain language, in 
> this case, English.

I'm not so sure. This is an idiolect of English that I've never
encountered before. Is anyone else on the list as puzzled as I am?

Neil Tennant



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