Bill - I think that's it. Logic has been treated by a bunch of distinct disciplines. Would be nice to have something to translate. Here's the concept, and here's how it's termed and defined by AI types, set theorists, philosophers, programmers, mathematicians, etc. It was when I tried to translate "begging the question" into nested IF statements that I had a short-circuit. "Necessary and sufficient cause" is an example. Very similar to "necessary and sufficient condition." But not quite. Sheesh. Can't we all get together and straighten all this stuff out? Need kind of a Lavoisier for logic. I think he's the one who said, wait. There are too many independent, overlapping, inconsistent ways organizing elements. Let's pull these things together, partly just to identify what's good and what's basically crap. And if you need to translate the final system back into Latvian, great. On Sat, Mar 26, 2011 at 12:00 PM, Bill Gosper <billgosper@gmail.com> wrote:
In freshman Humanities, we had to read Hume's
1. *An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding*<http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/david_hume/human_understanding.html>
**wherein he concluded causality was essentially illusory. Or so I gathered. In his gedanken mechanics, the terminology was so muddled and in conflict with modern terminology that I boggled. --rwg _______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun