On Thu, 2022-02-24 at 07:40 -0800, Kerim Aydin via agora-business wrote:
> I judge 3941 as follows:
>
> First, to be clear, The Device switch and The Device rule are not
> "devices" by virtue of their names alone.
>
> The phrase in question should be read in context of the full clause of
> the rule as "When The Device [switch] is on, a device is an entity
> with positive power." In common language, this is an odd phrase.
> But take the example: "when the sun is up, a plant is an entity that
> photosynthesizes". This sentence does not purport to grant any
> abilities to plants, rather it is descriptive/definitional: you can
> tell something is a plant because when the sun is up, it
> photosynthesizes - you define a plant by that property, and something
> without that property is not a plant.
>
> Importantly, such a sentence, though awkward, ties the activity
> ("photosynthesizes") to the state ("when the sun is up"), which
> provides a strong implication that the sun is an important trigger -
> it's an implication that something that photosynthesizes at any time
> (whether or not the sun is up) would not be part of this definition.
> Now, in pure logic space, this is not the reading. Take another
> phrase "When it is 11 o'clock, I am an entity that is human". Since I
> am a human at other times, that sentence is 100% logically correct.
> However, in common (though mangled) language and common sense that's
> not an appropriate interpretation - the existence of the conditional
> implies a connection between the conditional and the state, so a
> connection should be inferred.
>
> So, "when the device is on, a device is an entity with positive power"
> means that *if* there are entities that (through mechanisms elsewhere)
> gain positive power when The Device switch is on, those entities are
> devices. Otherwise, they aren't. Reading the rest of The Device
> rule, there are no entities that actually gain power when The Device
> is on, so there are no devices.
>
> I judge FALSE.
Although this reasoning would solve a few problems if it worked, I'm
not convinced it matches the language of the rule in question. "When
the sun is up, a plant is an entity that photosynthesizes", to me,
implies that all plants photosynthesize when the sun is up, rather than
implying that all things that photosynthesize when the sun is up are
plants. (That is, my reading of the sentence is identical to "When the
sun is up, a plant is an entity and it photosynthesizes".) Your reading
seems awkward to me because it's attempting to define something in the
middle of a sentence, with the definition given at the start and end, a
word order which is completely unnatural, whereas my reading has the
part of the sentence before the comma modifying the part afterwards,
and thus is much more natural.
Is there any reason to favour your interpretation of the sentence over
mine?
--
ais523
