On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 2:36 AM Fotis Loukos via dev-security-policy < dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org> wrote:
> On 4/12/18 8:30 μ.μ., Ryan Sleevi via dev-security-policy wrote: > > On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 5:02 AM Fotis Loukos < > me+mozdevsecpol...@fotisl.com> > > As far as I can tell, if no quantifiers are used in a proposition > written in the English language, then it is assumed to be a universal > proposition. If it were particular, then sentences such as "numbers are > bigger than 10" and "cars are blue" would be true, since there are some > numbers bigger than 10 and there are some cars that are blue. My > knowledge of the inner workings of the English grammar is not that good, > but at least this is what applies in Greek and in cs/logic (check > http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~cs122/.Fall14/tutorials/tut_2.php for > example). If I am mistaken, then it was error on my side. > Formally, yes, but in practice, there is ambiguity. For example, you can say "elderly people vote for X political party", and it doesn't have to mean that 100.0% of elderly people vote for that party for that to be a reasonably accurate statement, if by and large that population has a clear trend. That's not to agree or disagree with Ryan's statement, just noting that people do necessarily have to characterize groups sometimes, and that any characterization of a large enough group will usually not apply to all of its members. I know I personally belong to a number of demographic groups whose behavior as a group doesn't match mine as an individual, and when people criticize those demographic groups, I try not to take it as a personal attack. -- Eric _______________________________________________ dev-security-policy mailing list dev-security-policy@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-security-policy
