The Baby Paradox in Haskell
23 points by abhin4v
23 points by abhin4v
It’s interesting to me the author doesn’t touch on the fact that the reason why this feels natural in language, but a paradox in logic is because the word “everybody” gains an additional implicit linguistic restriction in the former case. Namely, that the group who loves Baby is “everybody other than Baby”, in which case the whole thing immediately stops being a paradox.
This frankly nitpick aside, I really enjoyed the article. The isomorphism is such a cool thing in how it joins two seemingly completely unrelated fields.
because the word “everybody” gains an additional implicit linguistic restriction in the former case.
It’s interesting to idly inspect the rules for this implicit restriction, too. It’s not just the object of the predicate that gets removed from the domain (“everyone loves themselves” is not vacuous), nor is it “any other variable” (“everyone loves someone” does not rule out said “someone” from loving someone else). It also depends on the predicate (“everyone loves my baby” excludes the baby, but “everyone resembles the first human” does not exclude the first human).
Linguists sure have it rough.