COMMENT ⊗   VALID 00002 PAGES
C REC  PAGE   DESCRIPTION
C00001 00001
C00002 00002	ysp[f88,jmc]		The Yale shooting and related problems
C00004 ENDMK
C⊗;
ysp[f88,jmc]		The Yale shooting and related problems

There is a reason for Fred to die and no reason for the gun
to become unloaded.  Suitably modifying the law of inertia
may get rid of the abnormality.  Perhaps the goal is to
avoid priorities in circumscription.

Can we make a similar problem that does not involve change?
A marriage is will go ok provided no-one objects.  The spurned suitor
will object unless he is afraid of ire.  Suppose there is
a spurned suitor, and there is no reason to believe he is
afraid.  Then we should conclude that the marriage will not
go ok.

In the flying bird problem, we explicitly cancel inheritance.  We
could do something like this in the ysp, but it would be quite
implausible.  We would have to say that loading the gun cancels
the normality of staying alive.

Extensionally the abstract scheme seems to be

¬ab1 ⊃ p
¬ab2 ⊃ q
q ⊃ ¬p, which is the same as  p ⊃ ¬q.

We want to take  q  as a good reason for  ¬p, so to break the
symmetry we need some intensionality.


Maybe it will help with YSP to postulate that changes must have
causes.  If the gun becomes unloaded there must be a cause of that.