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Re: [ontolog-forum] Confusion about 'model'

To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
From: "Smith, Barry" <phismith@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2007 15:56:48 +0200
Message-id: <20070715142016.50ED11094D9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
At 02:26 PM 7/15/2007, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Barry and Wacek,
>
>I agree with Barry about the normal use of natural languages:
>
>  > When I say 'the cat is on the mat' I, for one, am not intending
>  > to create a model of reality. Rather, I am attempting to say
>  > something about reality itself (this very cat).
>
>But I believe that making an explicit distinction between the model
>and reality is important for any application of formal languages,
>especially those that are processed by any computer system.
>
>A Tarski-style model of a formal language (in fact, the title of
>his famous paper explicitly limited it formal languages) is stated
>as a set D of the entities in some domain of discourse and a set R
>of relations over D.  The mapping of D and R to reality is often
>unstated, and for any important application, it's usually far
>from obvious.    (01)

and Tarski would not say that the sentences (e.g. of cat biology) for 
which we have a formal model are themselves about that model.
BS    (02)



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