🚀 go-pugleaf

frank@i1.msi.umn.edu (Loren Frank) writes:
>this sort fails to capture a number of intuitive notions like causality.
>	On the other hand there is also the less formal logic of "if I
>step in front of a speeding bus, I will get hurt." (I think someone said
>something like that recently) This makes sense, and seems logical, but it 
>cannot be demonstrated formally without the addition of a number of 
>premises having to do with the implications of stepping in front of,
>speeding, and so on. We do not think of that sort of everyday statement
>as logical in the formal sense, if for no other reason than we do not tend
>to think of things in the language of P and Q's and strict implication and so
>on. 

	If we step in front of a bus, we will get hit
	if we get hit, we get hurt
	If we step in front of a bus, we get hurt

	Fairly logical ... but it assumes prior knowledge of the
world, not gained by direct experience -- most people who have stepped
in fron t of busses have not lived to tell of it.


>	On a slightly related topic, when people are given the following
>scenario :Linda has been very active in social concerns for most
>of her life. During college she was involved in a number of organizations
>whose aim was to bolster the rights of the underrepresented. 
>People are then asked "which of the following is more likely:
>1) Linda is a bank teller.
>2) Linda is a bank teller and active in the feminist movement."
>People almost always choose 2) even though the likelyhood of a conjunction
>is always less than the likelyhood of one of the conjuncts.

>I am not quite sure what that means, but it is true...


	I do not know anything, but I THINK it means that people don't
care about the bank teller part -- whether or not it is true is irrelevant
to them, because the part about feminism seems so intuitively correct.

	Conclusion: confronted with a pattern that seems to reflect 
reality, people toss logic out the window, which is perhaps why we pretend
that math is unemptional.  If we believed it related to reality,
perhaps we would not be able to do it.

Luck
Rick