[Attempto] A comment on reasoning with RACE

[Simon Spero]

On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 2:02 PM, Norbert E. Fuchs <fuchs at ifi.uzh.ch> wrote:

> Hi
>
> Recently this mailing list discussed RACE's interpretation of the copula
> "to be", specifically whether the copula should be interpreted
> symmetrically so that RACE would perform the deduction
>
> (1) John is a man. |- A man is John.
>
[....]

> First, above I stated that the ACE sentences ACE_A and ACE_T are *assumed*
> to be true. This is an assumption that we – i.e. the human users – make.
> Nothing prevents us from deciding otherwise, for instance by assuming that
> the ACE theorem "A man is John." of (1) is not true. To prevent the
> deduction (1) in this situation, we must not add the auxiliary axiom "A is
> B |- B is A" to RACE. Otherwise, we would violate RACE's correctness since
> we could derive an ACE sentence that is not (assumed to be) true.



In general isn't desired inference  not entailed  if there are two things
which are men, and which are not the same -

(1a) *John is a man and Paul is a man and Paul is the walrus  |\= John is
the walrus.

Simon
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