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Full Idea
How do people identify subject and verb in the sentences "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like an apple"?
Gist of Idea
How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'?
Source
Keith Devlin (Goodbye Descartes [1997], Ch. 1)
Book Ref
Devlin,Keith: 'Goodbye Descartes: the end of logic' [Wiley 1997], p.7
A Reaction
A nice illustration of the fact that even if we have an innate syntax mechanism, it won't work without some semantics, and some experience of the environmental context of utterances.
| 8072 | Sentences of apparent identical form can have different contextual meanings [Devlin] |
| 8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
| 8076 | The distinction between sentences and abstract propositions is crucial in logic [Devlin] |
| 8082 | Where a conditional is purely formal, an implication implies a link between premise and conclusion [Devlin] |
| 8075 | Space and time are atomic in the arrow, and divisible in the tortoise [Devlin] |
| 8081 | 'No councillors are bankers' and 'All bankers are athletes' implies 'Some athletes are not councillors' [Devlin] |
| 8085 | Modern propositional inference replaces Aristotle's 19 syllogisms with modus ponens [Devlin] |
| 8086 | Predicate logic retains the axioms of propositional logic [Devlin] |
| 8087 | Golden ages: 1900-1960 for pure logic, and 1950-1985 for applied logic [Devlin] |
| 8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |
| 8091 | Situation theory is logic that takes account of context [Devlin] |
| 8089 | Montague's intensional logic incorporated the notion of meaning [Devlin] |
| 8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |