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Posted by Davιmon on 04/10/06 12:38
dorayme arranged shapes to form:
> In article <55yge2pfd8n5$.w18635w13l1c.dlg@40tude.net>,
> =?iso-8859-1?Q?Dav=E9mon?= <"davΓ©mon"@nospam.com> wrote:
>
>> in maths, two negatives make a positive, wheras in language
>> (English at least) two negatives are just emphatically negative. "I don't
>> know nothing about it".
>>
> This is quite misleading and vague I am afraid.
No it ain't! The point is that maths lacks the ability to be emphatic and
colloquial and so treating language as if it behaves like maths is, imho,
barking up the wrong tree in understanding lists.
>> The other difference between the idea of a list and a set, is that lists
>> imply an order, even an unordered list <ul> still retains that quality.
>
> This is because ordinary language is (usefully) vague. But you
> need to be a bit careful. Two lists can contains the same items
> but in different orders yet be the same: imagine a mother gives
> her child a list of things to buy, he loses it and she writes the
> list out again. It is the same list for all intents and purposes,
> the fact that a couple of items are in a different order is not
> important enough to make it an essentially different list.
Yet both lists retain an implied order, the order may be different and
arbitary to the author, but not to the reader:
A particually dilligent, and unconfident shopper (such as a child who loses
things often and is trying to be extra specially good...) might tick off,
in sequence, each item on the list in turn to make sure they get it, thus
the order of the list could add significant time to an otherwise reasonably
short trip. If the items were listed in order of a pre-planned route around
the supermarket the shopper might more quickly find each item quicker, and
if they were ordered alphabetically they'd be able to plan their own route,
but more quickly find the objects on the list etc. etc.
> If 500
> people list their equal favourite 3 films and all write the same
> films, their lists are the same.
>
The statistics you conclude from them may be the same, but the lists won't
be. It's possible you could find a statistical correlation between their
order, and add to your sum of knowledge regarding peoples selection of top
3 films.
> It all depends on context. The notion of a ul and an ol is a
> refinement, a clarification, a canonical logical representation
> of the possibilities in this area.
I agree that context creates meaning. A list isn't a meer representation of
possibilities, it is a defined, selected order of those possibilities.
Whether the ordering is intentionally arbitary or not, doesn't stop the
implication of an order being inherent to the form - even if it is meerly
'read it in this sequence', or 'you're familiar with this type of sequence
so you'll find it easy to scan through' and not 'this object is more
important than this other object'.
--
DavΓ©mon
http://www.nightsoil.co.uk/
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