Spencer Case, 'on the ground' in Afghanistan, writes:
Try translating the following sentence into logic: "No news is good news."
Whenever I try it, I end up saying that there isn't any good news and that's not what I mean to say. If you're not too terribly busy, I'd like to see how the trick is done.
Also, the Idaho State Journal has been publishing my blog online. It is available here.
Clearly, the translation cannot be: (x)(Nx --> ~Gx). For what the sentence means is not that no news report is a good news report. What it means is that it is good not to receive news reports. (For if one receives no news, one will not receive any bad news.) But even this is not quite right. To be precise, what the target sentence expresses in standard contexts of use is that every report that there is nothing to report is a good report. For any x and y, if x is a first-order report of recent events, and x expresses the proposition *There is nothing to report*, then x is a good report. In symbols: (x)(y)(Rx & Exy & y = *There is nothing to report* -->Gx).
But there may be a better parsing.
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