Re: categorization and generalization...

["Arthur W. Protin Jr." (GC-ACCURATE) <cbmvax!uunet!PICA.ARMY.MIL!protin>]

Folks,
    (As an aside, I wonder sometimes about the connectivity of this
network, especially now since I seem to have missed the beginning
of this thread and entered it from a direction I now have to reverse
somewhat.)

    I realized that I do have common legitimate uses for each of the
three (as of now) forms of mass reference.
    1) The collective as totally different from the individual:
		The hive was indifferent to the destruction of this
		small team of workers.
    2) The collective as all or most of it members:
		Mammals have hair and give milk.
    3) The collective as instances of ...:
		In spite of the Edsel's excellent technical design,
		they could not sell it to the public.

I favor distinguishing each of these different forms of reference
since alot of faulty proofs stand only by the confusion between
references (of this type and others), but I favor having each of
the forms available.


    It is always interesting to observe some one distill an entire
movement to one notion, one incident, one person, one mistake.  I
also do it.  While I don't think I did it with all of the NAZI movement,
I have a different point of failure for Adolf Hitler's hatred of
the Jews.  Hilter, like a great many people, could not do valid
inferencing on sets.  The same error is commited today by opponents
of marijuanna and assault weapons.

    Hilter found that most of the communist and labor leaders he
opposed in his youth in Austria were Jews.  He followed many people
who smelled bad and found that they were Jews.  Thus he concluded
Jews were smelly communists.
    Anti-marijuanna lobbyists quickly point out that most heroin
users used marijuanna before they tried heroin.
    The New York police (commisioner or chief or someother top
official) said that assault weapons had no legitimate use because
most drug dealers owned assault weapons and most serious crimes
were committed in conjunction with assault weapons.

    NONE OF THESE ARGUMENTS ARE VALID!!!

Statements of the forms "[all, most] X [are, have, ...] Y" say
little or nothing about Y.

    To determine if Jews smell more or worse than non-Jews,
examine the set of all Jews.  If you insist on working with
a tractible number of tests, select a random and representitive
sample of Jews, and another random, representitive sample of
non-Jews; then test their odors and compare.  Correct methods
might have had some truly interesting effects on Hilter.
(Similarly faulty logic about sets and heredity undermines
the entirety of the NAZI position.)
    By the logic of the marijuanna-heroin link, tobacco and
chewing gum should be banned as well because 97 of all heroin
addicits chewed gum before trying heroin!.  This logic also
fails miserably to explain why millions of marijuanna users
only yields thousands of heroin addicts.
    And while I can see very little need for common access to
assault weapons, the issue of their abuse is only correctly
addressed by the question: "What percentage of assault weapons
are being used for crime?".

    I am afraid that an attempt to make the language fallacy-free
will make it useless and unusable.  I simple want a language that
does not enshrine the fallacies, and allows us to easily express
things without them.  Is that too much to hope for?


    thank you all,
        Art


Arthur Protin <protin@pica.army.mil>
These are my personal views and do not reflect those of my boss
or this installation.