Re: Confessions of a CoBOL programmer

In article <cfgqu3tl6n58nukfgug5lvsqpjbqsfvurf@xxxxxxx>,
Howard Brazee <howard@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 28 Mar 2008 18:32:16 +0000 (UTC), docdwarf@xxxxxxxxx () wrote:

(If it is true that Everyone Knows the population having (skill) is older
and Everyone Knows that older workers frequently command higher salaries
then Everyone Knows the population having (skill) may frequently command
higher salaries... on the other hand... the ability of those human-being
type folks to deny what seem to be logically valid conclusions has been
seen before... let me see... nigh a decade back, from
<http://groups.google.com/group/comp.software.year-2000/msg/da8c9f200ee62949?dmode=source>

I see your point, and I love your story that I started to quote below.
But I'm not sure that I get the same definitive lesson.

For instance, everybody raising their hand to accept the premises but
not the logical conclusion could be because they were wrong in
accepting the premises.

Mr Brazee, that would appear to indicate that they misrepresented their
thoughts - 'how many of you think' - or that their thoughts had changed
during the short course of the presentation.

'How many of you think that all men are mortal?' (hands up)
'How many of you think that Socrates is a man?' (hands up)
'How many of you think that Socrates is mortal?' 'Uh..... maybe I was
wrong when I said I thought all men are mortal... or maybe Socrates isn't
a man now.'


Or it could be that the definitions of "problems a community has" and
"problems that a company has" are related.

Of course, that might be your point.

What I attempted to demonstrate, Mr Brazee, was that the logical abilities
demonstrated by some folks in Corporate America can reach levels of
refusing to accept things which 'follow of necessity'.

(note - Aristotle, Prior Analytics, Book I, Part 1, paragraph 4, sentence
1: 'A syllogism is discourse in which, certain things being stated,
something other than what is stated follows of necessity from their being
so. I mean by the last phrase that they produce the consequence, and by
this, that no further term is required from without in order to make the
consequence necessary.' - http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/prior.mb.txt )

DD

.