Steve writes: "I do like the stylization of upper case initiated variables similar to Marcus PROLOG reference, though if I understand him correctly I use it differently."
Simple logic programs can be nothing but a conjunction of predicates. In this situation the predicates would be the reader's internal checks on the argument so far. What is nailed down and what is not yet nailed down and certain relationships between the terms. Suppose that one or two of the terms in the argument is not "over parsed". One can approach that uncertainty not from the bottom-up building the meaning term by term, but from the top-down and ask: What assignments of the term "evil" will satisfy the predicates I have? What is Glen really saying? And from that, deduce the meaning of the word, say, that "evil" means "sneaky" or "clever" or "the property of an individual that for better or worse doesn't show her hand". This is probably not so different from how natural language is really learned. If the correspondent can be led into taking this approach, the conversation could be more interesting (or exhausting) because the discussion isn't about one topic, but many potential topics. It can also be entertaining if one or more of correspondents have no awareness of it happening. There has been some discussion here about how Trump apparently lets his audience do this. We can call that `evil', but the real evil IMO is that his audience is stupid and never reconciles their own term bindings. It is quite clever of Trump to observe that people that are caught in these contradictions often double down and become even more irrational and committed to them. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ by Dr. Strangelove
