| In a message dated 8/9/2001 9:19:07 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: >The best simplification I could find in a dash was ~(Q&R) &(P => QvR) , Yup! One problem with working at a dash when you have lousy handwriting (never mind P anQ, it's T and F that are the problems). <The actual reduction, funnily enough, turns out to be (Q xor R), independent of P! What's more, this other one: [(P iff Q) and (not P iff R)] xor [(not P iff Q) and (P iff R)] also reduces to the same thing: (Q xor R). This makes sense, because the truth value of "Q or R depending on P" cannot depend on the truth value of P, since we are not specifying what the dependency is. This fits in very nicely with the Pkau interpretation, which might be: Pkau => (Q xor R)> I would have taken the reduction as evidence that this was a totally inappropriate rendition of "Q or R depending on P" since it says that Qor R regardless of P (or anything else). But then, I don't understand what all of this has to do with indirect questions exactly -- or with whatever keeps being called indirect questions while being neither (unless "indirect" means "vague"). I suppose "{xn} depends on {ym}" means something like "there is a set of true conditionals (not necessarily truth-functional, if that bothers people)whose antecedents are each a member of {ym} and whose consequents are membersof {xn}" and then some details about completeness and exclusiveness -- which might vary from case to case, as might the details of how the conditionals run. The vaguer terms ("what's for dinner," "what's in the icebox," "what the weather is") just cover these lack of details, while guaranteeing the gneral (though possibly vacuous) claim. The only connection I can see between all this and questions is the possibility that expressions like "what's in the icebox" stands for a set of answers (claims in this case, not propositions). |