Re: Name the thesis: "Formal sentences capture informal ones"

From: george (greeneg_at_cs.unc.edu)
Date: 02/01/05 

Date: 1 Feb 2005 08:08:41 -0800

> On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 tchow@lsa.umich.edu wrote:
>
> > (*) Formal sentences (in PA or ZFC for example)
> > adequately express their informal counterparts.
> >

William Elliot wrote:
> A formal sentence could have an unintuitive
> or even incomprehensible informal counterpart

Or no informal counterpart, or more than one
informal counterpart. In real life what the
formal sentence tends to have is NOT counterparts
BUT RATHER informal APPROXIMATIONS, of various degrees
of closeness/accuracy. As well as of various degrees
of understandability or pedagogical efficacy.
OBVIOUSLY, THE WHOLE GOAL is to find, out of the MANY
possible informal counterparts, the ones that are most
accurate AND effective.

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