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From: howard@metheus.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Use of "and" - (nf)
Message-ID: <237@metheus.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 19-Apr-84 22:01:54 EST
Article-I.D.: metheus.237
Posted: Thu Apr 19 22:01:54 1984
Date-Received: Sun, 22-Apr-84 08:28:51 EST
References: <32300023@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Organization: Metheus, Portland Oregon
Lines: 33

The "Indiana & Ohio" problem can be explained by a feature of human language
processing which goes on all the time, although we are not often conciously
aware of it.  I refer, of course, to the rejection of contradictory, unlikely,
or impossible interpretations.

The reason we interpret "all customers in Indiana and Ohio" to mean "all
customers in Indiana and *all customers in* Ohio" is that the seemingly
logical interpretation is contradictory and cannot possibly refer to any
customers (regardless of what is in the database).  It is interesting to
note in this connection that some oriental forms of logic require that a
pair of examples be given for each set of things to be described, one of an
thing in the set, the other of an thing out of the set.  This prevents
wasting time with arguments based on the null set, like "All purple cows
made out of neutrinos can fly; all animals that can fly have wings; therefore
all purple cows made out of neutrinos have wings".  An example syllogism:
"Where there is smoke, there is fire.  Here, there is smoke: like in a kitchen,
unlike in a lake.  Therefore, here there is fire."

This rejection is extremely sophisticated, and includes, for example, infinite
loop detection.  An example: how many people would take the obvious "logical"
interpretation of the instructions "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." to be the correct
one?  We all automatically read this as "Lather. Rinse. Repeat the previous two instructions once." because the other reading doesn't make physical sense.
How many people ever had to THINK about that, consciously, at all?

Also, it is customary to be able to be able to delete redundant or implied
information from a sentence.  Since the three words between stars above are
somewhat redundant, and can be deleted without affected the only reasonable
interpretation of the phrase, it should be O.K. to delete them.

Just more fat on the fire (my, how it sizzle!) from:

	Howard A. Landman
	ogcvax!metheus!howard