So how many is "any"?
Jul. 10th, 2012 02:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyI often get antsy when I see existential or universal quantifiers used in real life. The real world has a lot of uncertainty and continuity, and, for many purposes, is a big place. This results in a lot of existential statements being trivially true, and universal statements being trivially false. (Many aren't, of course, but, well, I'm not talking about those.)
So you see one of these and you're left thinking, "They can't really mean 'any' (or 'all'), right? They must mean 'some significant amount', or 'almost all', right?" Which is a problem when this is a question on a written piece of paper you have to answer, so you can't ask it for clarification.
(Admittedly, using fuzzy words like "often" or "usually" might not be any better; they just move the fuzziness around. But at least I could be certain they meant what they said, even if I couldn't quite be certain what that was.)
The example I have in mind here is when you go to the doctor's office and you have to fill out a questionnaire on your medical history. Check the box if you've ever experienced any of the following. And quite a few of the following boxes are for a number of mild symptoms that you have almost certainly experienced at some point in life. Which forces you to think, what do they really mean? They wouldn't actually ask a useless question like this, right? But apparently they have. So I just fill it out as stated and explain later when they go over it with me, but I still have no idea what the intended use is.
-Harry
So you see one of these and you're left thinking, "They can't really mean 'any' (or 'all'), right? They must mean 'some significant amount', or 'almost all', right?" Which is a problem when this is a question on a written piece of paper you have to answer, so you can't ask it for clarification.
(Admittedly, using fuzzy words like "often" or "usually" might not be any better; they just move the fuzziness around. But at least I could be certain they meant what they said, even if I couldn't quite be certain what that was.)
The example I have in mind here is when you go to the doctor's office and you have to fill out a questionnaire on your medical history. Check the box if you've ever experienced any of the following. And quite a few of the following boxes are for a number of mild symptoms that you have almost certainly experienced at some point in life. Which forces you to think, what do they really mean? They wouldn't actually ask a useless question like this, right? But apparently they have. So I just fill it out as stated and explain later when they go over it with me, but I still have no idea what the intended use is.
-Harry
