Re: categorization and generalization...

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

Folks,
    Richard Kennaway offered up the following quote,
> "When I went through adolescence, people in grey suits wanted to
> force me to wear a green suit and go into a jungle and shoot at people
> in black pajamas who were shooting back, and people in blue suits would
> try to club me on the head if I complained."
, as being
> striking for its *avoidance* of mass terms.

    However, I consider the word "people" to be exactly one of the
mass terms with which we have the discussed difficulty, and this
usage is an example of a quote in which we can NOT determine whether
the author intended "people" to be instances of "Mr Person" or
some subset of those entities to whom we would ascribe the property
"person".  It is terribly unclear to me if the author is a rare
instance of someone with greater sanity than the norm, or one whose
insanity also included the need to be contrary to the norm.

    thank you all,
    Art Protin


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