John, (01)
I was neither complaining, nor suggesting the situation must be
repaired; this was just a side remark. I am clear that vagueness and
ambiguity is often an advantage of NL, not a disadvantage. But,
perhaps, official specifications should avoid vaguenesses and
ambiguities for the sake of (almost) logical correctness. For after
all, these specifications are to be used to implement dumb, but logical
software. (02)
I do not disagree with you on this. (03)
vQ (04)
John F. Sowa wrote:
> Wacek,
>
> That is the kind of technical nicety that causes normal people
> to avoid inviting logicians to social events:
>
>> It is confusing to say that an XML document is well-formed in the sense
>> of its conformance to the XML syntax, since:
>>
>> - this way of speaking is suggestive of that there can be a
>> non-well-formed XML document (where 'well-formed' still refers to the
>> XML syntax), while
>> - a document that does not conform to the XML syntax simply is not an
>> XML document.
>
> There are vast numbers of documents whose authors had hoped
> that they might meet the standards of an "XML document", but
> for one reason or another, there was a syntactic flaw.
>
> In all natural languages, there are adjectives, sometimes
> called "privative" adjectives, that deprive the noun of some
> attributes it normally has. Examples include "counterfeit
> money" or "bad grammar" or "poorly formed sentence".
>
> Such phrases cannot be translated to predicate calculus simply
> by taking a predicate P(x) that represents the adjective and
> another predicate Q(x) that represents the noun and writing
> the conjunction
>
> P(x) & Q(x).
>
> The option of using privative adjectives is a strength of NLs,
> not a weakness. I suggest that the documentation used for
> formal languages take advantage of that option. I detest the
> phrase "abuse of language", which some logicians deliberately
> attach to usage which is correct in any NL.
>
> John (05)
--
Wacek Kusnierczyk (06)
------------------------------------------------------
Department of Information and Computer Science (IDI)
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Sem Saelandsv. 7-9
7027 Trondheim
Norway (07)
tel. 0047 73591875
fax 0047 73594466
------------------------------------------------------ (08)
_________________________________________________________________
Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/
Subscribe/Config: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/
Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/
Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/
To Post: mailto:ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (09)
|