Re: What Is A Relation?

What Is A Relation?
Reply to David Bourget

Re: http://philpapers.org/post/792
Re: http://philpapers.org/browse/13/thread.pl?tId=222#p792

Maybe the question of ''adicity'' (some say ''arity'')
can be put in relief by contrasting relations that
have a fixed arity with those that do not.

For example, a formal language L is a particular subset
of the set of all finite strings on a finite alphabet A.
One writes:  L subset of A*.

We may view a sentence of L as having some mysterious quality of
grammaticality that it shares with all the other sentences of L,
which property may be the job of a language learner to suss out
from a more or less impoverished sample of examples.

But we may also view the sentences of L as tuples of finite but
various lengths, construing L as a generalized type of relation
with no fixed arity overall.

Jon Awbrey

External link: http://philpapers.org/post/1175

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