Re: [ontolog-forum] ambiguity interferes with

["Deborah MacPherson" <debmacp@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks John, printing and reading. Actually, I think ambiguity may be what makes the world go around and look forward to reading these materials. 

Thanks Jack, I'm so happy to see you describe the examples as "crafted" and will look at these. It would be interesting to hear the author/artist Steve Newcombs views. I realize now after reading ontolog-forum that probably homegrown tags and tag gardeners are what I'm interested in mainly to connect these people to their counterparts at museums and other government organizations with public information. 

In my opinoin, what needs to happen is writing or specifying this design criteria, which I don't think is an ontology after all. If there could be what Pat Hayes called a kind of "building code" that would really let the tag gardeners and PhD curators, research scientists and others actually connect to each other on a level playing field. Will look at your suggested links and digest them for awhile now. Thanks. 

This things have been bothering me and I appreciate the pointers and explanations. 

Sincerely,

Debbie

On 3/10/07, John F. Sowa < sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Debbie,

Ambiguity is inevitable.

It sometimes causes trouble.  For certain special cases,
it is possible to create artificial languages that
eliminate ambiguity -- but *only* for those special cases.

It is not possible to eliminate ambiguity, because that
would also freeze science, engineering, business, art, and
*life* in a static, unalterable toy universe that endlessly
repeats its preset moves -- like a computer program.

See the following abstract and paper.

John
________________________________________________

Source: http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/dynonto.htm

A Dynamic Theory of Ontology

John F. Sowa

Abstract.  Natural languages are easy to learn by infants, they can
express any thought that any adult might ever conceive, and they
accommodate the limitations of human breathing rates and short-term
memory.  The first property implies a finite vocabulary, the second
implies infinite extensibility, and the third implies a small upper
bound on the length of phrases.  Together, they imply that most words in
a natural language will have an open-ended number of senses — ambiguity
is inevitable.  Peirce and Wittgenstein are two philosophers who
understood that vagueness and ambiguity are not defects in language, but
essential properties that enable it to accommodate anything and
everything that people need to say.  In analyzing the ambiguities,
Wittgenstein developed his theory of language games, which allow words
to have different senses in different contexts, applications, or modes
of use.  Recent developments in lexical semantics, which are remarkably
compatible with the views of Peirce and Wittgenstein, are based on the
recognition that words have an open-ended number of dynamically changing
and context-dependent microsenses. The resulting flexibility enables
natural languages to adapt to any possible subject from any perspective
for any humanly conceivable purpose. To achieve a comparable level of
flexibility with formal ontologies, this paper proposes an organization
with a dynamically evolving collection of formal theories, systematic
mappings to formal concept types and informal lexicons of natural
language terms, and a modularity that allows independent distributed
development and extension of all resources, formal and informal.


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www.deborahmacpherson.com

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