#entailment

[happi-speech]

"Op got big tiddies" <- entails one must have tiddies to have big tiddies

"My pussy is not bald" <- presupposes pussy has hair

This is so fundamental in language but breaking it down like this got me gimakdkjwhdjwjskakw

[its-all-too-much-but-not-enough]

[thelingspace]

How do events factor into our mental linguistics? How can we adjust our logic to capture different sentence permutations? In this week's episode, we take a look at event semantics: what problems they're meant to solve, how they help us limit time and place in our sentences, and what evidence we have that events are real.

Glad to be back, and we’ve got some exciting things coming up, too! Looking forward to hearing what people have to say. ^_^

[spuriusbrocoli]

Don't eat some of the cat

And now children, a brief lesson on implicatures and entailment:

Entailment is when one statement means that another statement is logically and necessarily true. E.g., if (1) below is true, then (2) is logically and necessarily true.

(1) All of the students fought a bear.

(2) Some of the students fought a bear.

To say (1) means that (2) is logically and necessarily true. It would be impossible for (2) to be false if (1) is true. If all students have fought a bear, then some students have fought a bear. Therefore (1) logically entails (2).

(Non-negative) entailment always works “downwards”. Given (2), it is not necessarily and logically true that (1), for instance. If some students have fought a bear, that does not mean that all students have fought a bear.

 An implicature is created when a statement does not necessarily have any given meaning, but is assumed to have that meaning because of the context. The implicature is that “additional” meaning. E.g., if you asked someone (3) below, and they responded with (4), you would assume (5).

(3) Where can I buy a sandwich?

(4) There’s a newspaper stand up the street.

(5) I can buy a sandwich at the newspaper stand.

We intuitively assume that the response in (4) answers the question in (3). So to ensure that (4) is a good response to (3), we create the implicature (5). (5) is not an inherent meaning to (4) in its own,but we create that meaning and assign it to (4) even though it had not previously existed.

Entailment and implicatures also interact. When we ask a question like (6), and someone responds with (7), then we assume (8).

(7) Did all the students fight a bear?

(8) Some of the students fought a bear.

(9) Not all of the students fought a bear.

(9a) Those students who did not are weak and will not survive the winter.

Here, we ask a question about all of the students ((7)), and our interlocutor gives an answer about some of the students ((8)). Remember from (1) and (2) that entailment is downwards, and that all entails some.

Because some does NOT entail all, we create the implicature (9) to make sense of the response in (8). After all, if all of the students had fought a bear (like real men), then it would have been best to simply say “Yes”. Therefore, we create implicatures based on entailment.

Entailment also interacts with negation (i.e., making any statement negative). If we asked (10), and the response was (11), it would be logically and necessarily incorrect to assume (12). (The pound sign (#) indicates an infelicitous – semantically wrong – statement.)

(10) Did all the students fight a bear?

(11) None of the students fought a bear.

(12) # Some of the students fought a bear.

(12a) # Not all of the students are cowards and traitors.

Here, none not only entails not all, but it entails not some and not any. And (12) cannot be a felicitous implicature because deriving (12) directly violates logical entailment. If (11) is true, then (12) must logically and necessarily be false.

And now to address the proposition brought before us by the anon (reproduced in (13)).

(13) Don’t eat some of the cat.

This is actually a fascinating case study in terms of implicatures because it plays with both entailment AND negation. That means we can derive one of two implicatures ((14a) and (14b)).

(14a) Don’t eat any of the cat.

(14b) Eat all of the cat.

As this is an ambiguous case, I find myself needing to respond to both possible implicatures, as their responses are different (albeit coherent with one another).

(14a): Already intended not to eat any of the cat.

(14b): No.

[amongthereads]

A Captain for Caroline Gray by Julie Wright - Book Review

A Captain for Caroline Gray by Julie Wright – Book Review

Some aspects of Regency life in England baffle me. Well, probably many, but one in particular that comes to mind is the concept of entailment. Which basically leaves an unmarried daughter at the mercy of any relative who might have the means to support her when her father died – the property he owned going instead to a more distant male relative. You can read a little more about it here if you…

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[bsahely]

No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere | Giuseppe Longo, Maël Montévil & Stuart Kauffman

No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere | Giuseppe Longo, Maël Montévil & Stuart Kauffman

Reproduced from: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1201.2069v1.pdf

No entailing laws, but enablement in the evolution of the biosphere

Giuseppe Longo, Maël Montévil, Stuart Kauffman∗

*Authors affliations: GL and MM: CNRS, CREA – Polytechnique et CIRPHLESS – Ecole Normale Sup., Paris (Fr.); SK: Tampere University of Technology (Fi), University of Vermont (USA), Calgary University, Canada; [email protected],…

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[hpmorganpsych101]

WTF is WTF

WTF.... World.Truth.False

this is a system for determining if a statement is true, and can be disproven by the use of a counterexample. For When P-->Q and P=truth and Q=false

There are 3 kinds of “if P then, Q” statements:

1)Material conditional P ⊃ Q “If... Then” or “it just so happens to be”

2)Entailment P ⇒ Q “Necessarily, if P, then Q.” or “P entails Q” (Necessarily means that it obtains in every possible world.)

3)Counterfactual conditional P □ -->Q “If P WERE the case, then Q WOULD be the case” EX: “had there been X, then Y would happen”

Entailment= strongest connection

counterfactual= somewhere in the middle

Material conditional= weakest connection

1) Material Conditional (P ⊃ Q)

(P ⊃ Q)  is false when: in the actual world, P is true while Q is false.

**Every claim having no counter example is true**

EX: (if you own all of the gold on planet earth) ⊃ (you are wealthy)

TRUE

**if the P is false, the Q is automatically true**

EX2: (Mt. Everest is a rock laden mountain) ⊃ (elephants can jump)

FALSE

2)Entailment (P ⇒ Q)

Necessarily (all the time, in every world ever) P, then Q will obtain.

(P ⇒ Q) is false when: in at least one possible world where P=truth and Q=false

This all was very confusing when I first was introduced to it, but now that I am going back and have had time to think about it all, it makes sense how this logic is broken down. I feel like the hardest thing to understand is that all of this is just a mathematical/English representation of my thoughts and how my brain processes statements as to what is true and what is false. It may take a while for it to really sink in that all this logic section is, is just the quantification of our thoughts and logic, nothing more. So when you are confused, think very literally, and just use logic, and 99% of the time, you will be okay

[dickensign]

WOTD: entailment