Timeline for Unusual change of meaning of word "any" in negative sentences form "for all" to "there exists". Predicate logic
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 22 at 7:51 | vote | accept | Alex Alex | ||
| May 1 at 9:00 | history | bumped | CommunityBot | This question has answers that may be good or bad; the system has marked it active so that they can be reviewed. | |
| Apr 3 at 5:41 | comment | added | Double Knot | The difficulties lie in the context since natural language is not context free while FOL is, thus 'any' can be simply regarded as 'all', like 'each' and 'every', just beware of context during whole sentence translation. For examples discussed below, "If you can speak any language, you must be a genius" the entity of interest is the person 'you', thus it's really a nested conditional. While "If you can use any programming language, you can write a program to solve this problem", the entity of interest is programming language, thus it's really a simpler single conditional. 'you' is irrelevant... | |
| Apr 1 at 8:34 | answer | added | user21820 | timeline score: 0 | |
| S Mar 14 at 9:11 | history | suggested | Ben | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fixed grammar
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| Mar 5 at 3:06 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Mar 14 at 9:11 | |||||
| Feb 25 at 8:33 | comment | added | Conifold | It is not unusual, "any" generally behaves universally in affirmative contexts and existentially in negative contexts, and not just in English. Defining what "affirmative" and "negative" (downward entailing) mean in general is subtle, see Levy's dissertation, pp. 13-20 for details, but it does depend only on the logical form of the sentence. | |
| S Feb 25 at 8:13 | review | First questions | |||
| Mar 2 at 9:53 | |||||
| S Feb 25 at 8:13 | history | asked | Alex Alex | CC BY-SA 4.0 |