sometimes there comes a pronoun after a common [individual], which has apparently been used as the object of a legal decision (ḥukm), and by means of external evidence, the certainty is achieved that this pronoun refers to some common individuals. then, the question arises as to whether reference of the pronoun to some common individuals would cause its designation or the common generality cont...

One sometimes reads in a mathematical proof that a certain assumption can be made ‘without loss of generality’ (WLOG). In other words, it is claimed that considering what first appears only a special case does nevertheless suffice to prove the general result. Typically the intuitive justification for this is that one can exploit symmetry in the problem. We examine how to formalize such ‘WLOG’ a...

The purpose of this note is pedagogi-cal. It discusses how one can reduce the computational cost of applying a set of operators (or predicates) by breaking them up into combinations of commonly occurring, simpler ones. This can be thought of as a process of generalization, in the sense that the common, simple operators are more "general" than the original, more complex ones. We are thus suggest...

Several recent papers Cohen, 1990c; Flann and Dietterich, 1989] have presented learning systems that use, as background knowledge, an initial domain theory that is overgeneral: that is, a theory that deenes a concept that is a superset of the concept to be learned. Learning then becomes a problem of specializing the initial theory. Such an overgeneral theory is, of course, only one of many poss...