Marcus -
I personally am a fan of "late binding" in natural language. If I defer
it too late, it can get me in trouble... Trump got a lot of slack from
me along the way because of this. I can't tell if "Trump is clever to
observe that people ... " or his pattern matching skills lead him to
realize that between (many) people's natural deference to power and his
active use of ambiguity in language lead to a LOT of people ranging from
"giving him the benefit of the doubt" and "actively imputing beliefs or
capabilities to him that he patently does not hold".
It is probably obvious from my presence in this general discussion that
*I TOO* am avoiding an unpleasant task or two. Mine are perhaps more
mundane than your own.
- Steve
On 5/5/17 3:10 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
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
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