Students sometimes find trivial universalizations, like "All unicorns have three horns", confusing. I just overheard my teenage daughter explain this in a really elegant way: She said she has zero Australian friends and zero Australian friends came to her birthday party, so all her Australian friends came to her birthday party.
The principle that if there are n Fs, and n of the Fs are Gs, then all the Fs are Gs is highly intuitive. However, the principle does need to be qualified, which may confuse students: it only works for finite values of n. Still, it seems preferable to except only the infinite case rather than both zero and infinity.
1 comment:
"However, the principle does need to be qualified, which may confuse students: it only works for finite values of n."
Do that Dr Pruss and you create confusion concerning limited atonement and infinite atonement...
Post a Comment