Good point (how about “white AND snobbish AND (rich OR smart)”?)
Actually, we nerds may be making a mistake by literally interpreting a statement like “rich and white and smart and snobbish” as a formula of propositional logic with boolean operators, whereas actually it’s being used as shorthand for “the typical Harvard student has most characteristics in the set [rich, white, smart, snobbish]”.
Is it? Although from a logic point of view such a definition is better, it is my experience what when people say “rich and white and smart and snobbish” they actuall mean AND in the boolean sense. The key is that the definition should be what a generic person (ie not one of us [ie one of “them”]) would think, rather than what actually makes sense/works.
Good point (how about “white AND snobbish AND (rich OR smart)”?)
Actually, we nerds may be making a mistake by literally interpreting a statement like “rich and white and smart and snobbish” as a formula of propositional logic with boolean operators, whereas actually it’s being used as shorthand for “the typical Harvard student has most characteristics in the set [rich, white, smart, snobbish]”.
Is it? Although from a logic point of view such a definition is better, it is my experience what when people say “rich and white and smart and snobbish” they actuall mean AND in the boolean sense. The key is that the definition should be what a generic person (ie not one of us [ie one of “them”]) would think, rather than what actually makes sense/works.