The logic of 'many' and 'most'

As J writes, What You See Is What You Get holds for 'many if not most' cases. I wonder about 'many' and 'most'.

It seems the old Latins never used those words?

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It seems to me that 'most' is more important than 'many'.

E.g.

"Most own a Rolls Royce here"

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It does not mean "many" do.

Yes, we need the universe of discourse.

So, Let's assume that if

n > 50%,

I would say, "most"

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Similarly, if

n < 50%

I would NOT say 'most' -- It doesn't mean I would say 'few'.

Possibly 'fewest' should be used, too.

"Many" seems pretty vague. "Many happy returns of the day", they say.

Similarly, they speak of many-valued logic. And then you ask them, 'what do you mean 'many'?' and they say 'three'! -- Not really that many.

Etc.

In checking for this, I find that wiki uses 'multal' for 'many' -- "the multal quantifier" -- and 'paucal' for 'few' ("the paucal quantifier").

The way to go is the threshold, which is indicated as being the exact half. So if more than a half do, it's many. Etc.

It may be argued that if the class of students is 30 (by law no class can be bigger in some schools), and 5 are red-haired, one may want to say that "many" students are red-haired, but I think this is implicatural.

Surely 5 cannot be 'many'.

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So if "many" is held to be 'many' in "5 red-haired students" that's because 'red-haired' we don't get many SIMPLICITER.

It is different if you know genetics. Apparently, red hair is INHERITED. So I would suggest that in a red-haired family (wife married a red-haired, being herself red-haired) to say that "many" are red-haired would be otiose if not downright misleading.

Note that 'many if not most' is not reciprocal:

"most if not many" does sound odd.

Murphy once claimed that this was a failure of 'scalar implicature'.

In a scale,

"Some, if not all, of my students know Greek".

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makes sense.

Murphy argued that, by the same logic,

"The shepherd culled some cows from the herd".

Murphy argued that, by the same token, adding, 'if not all', yields to some sort of paradox:

"The shepherd culled some, if not all, of the cows from the herd."

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I don't find that above as paradoxical, provided we expand it:

"from the herd, which thus ceased to exist".

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Geach called this pleonetetic, and it was used by Altham -- but the conversational implicatures have not really been studied -- by my aunt.