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reuabraah284
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reuabraah284
Friday, Aug 31 2018

I guess what I'm describing is just faulty generalization. Thanks for helping me get clear on that! :-)

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reuabraah284
Friday, Aug 31 2018

Thanks so much! Perhaps if I think of it in a different phrasing it will stick better for me. When they say 'some unicorns are fluffy', it could be read as - 'within the set of all unicorns, (at least) some (1, not 2) unicorn is fluffy.' I will just accept that this is the way it is for the LSAT.

It's not something that is really holding back my studies, just a point that I thought was worth raising. Is there not some formal logical fallacy wherein one observes that a singular member of a set possesses a certain attribute and then concludes that more than one of that set possesses that attribute, discounting the possibility that the singular observed instance is an exception that does not generalize further across the set at all? Maybe that's the fallacy I'm committing, or maybe it's related to my original question. I can't tell. :-) Thanks again!

Can anyone please explain to me why the lower bound for ‘some’ is 1 and not 2? Is there no distinction in logic between a singular instance of something occurring within a set vs it occurring at least twice? Isn't it fallacious to conclude that 'some' things in a set possess a certain attribute from the observation of a singular occurrence of that attribute within the set?

For example, the sentence ‘some unicorns are fluffy’ would seem to imply that there are at least two unicorns that are fluffy. Same with the ‘some’ mice living in my home’ example from the lessons on existential quantifiers. J.Y. concludes that if we know that there are 'some' mice in the house, or 'some' unicorns that are fluffy, then we know that there is at least 1 mouse in that house and at least 1 fluffy unicorn. However, the plural forms of the nouns - ‘unicorns’ and ‘mice’ - are used in both of these examples, which would imply more than 1 of each entity. In fact in most cases that I can think of, the word 'some' implies a plurality of the noun that follows it.

If there were 100 unicorns in the world and 99 of them weren’t fluffy while only 1 of them was, could we really accurately conclude that ‘some’ unicorns (again, plural) are fluffy from this singular instance of fluffiness? What if that unicorn was an anomaly and turns out to be the only fluffy unicorn in the history of unicorns?

#help

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