> >> Seems to me that efforts like <http://cl.tamu.edu/>Common Logic and
>>> <http://www.w3.org/TR/lbase/>LBase would either have to a) be defined
>>> within this type of an open ended system, letıs say as the natural
>>> language description of the constraints to which the axioms that
>>> make up the theory of such a system would adhere; or b) evolve
>>> into an open ended system that exhibits characteristics
>>> of transformation across languages, logics, models and theories.
>>
>> No, neither. Common logic is simply a modernized Net-savvy restatement
>> of first-order logic, in an attempt to get past the interoperability
>> problems arising from the huge variety of surface notations in use.
>
>But Feferman's talking about openness of language and you're saying
>surface notation. What's the difference? (01)
Er... what have they in common? By 'surface
notation' I mean only a particular concrete
syntax for a single given language. Examples of
such concrete syntaxes for FOL are (using a
familiar example text) (02)
(forall ((x Man))(Mortal x)) (03)
<upside-down A> x. Man(x) <unicode 2283> Mortal(x) (04)
:Man rdfs:subClassOf :Mortal . (05)
[Every Man:] Mortal [Self] (06)
(forall (?x)(=> (Man ?x)(Mortal ?x))) (07)
:. A x: Man x .implies. Mortal x :. (08)
mortal X ::- man X (09)
and of course one can go on with dozens of
examples. These are all saying exactly the same
thing: they have identical semantics, and even
the same 'abstract' syntactic form, but they are
written in different surface notations which
require different parsers. The colon character,
for example, plays entirely different roles in
the third, fourth and sixth examples
(respectively an XML Qname indicator, a
quantifier marker, and a scoping device in
dot-notation). Omitting the ? before the x in the
fifth example would produce a parsing error (in
KIF), but this convention is irrelevant in the
other cases. Etc.. (010)
CL is simply a standard for overcoming this
theoretically uninteresting, but practically
infuriating, barrier to communication, is all.
And doing this took many man-years of effort and
a determined, even draconian at times, approach.
Writing standards is not easy, even when their
content is moderately obvious. (011)
>I've lumped in
>non-monotonicity, model theories and axiomatic semantics. (012)
You seem to be making a kind of intellectual
Jambalaya here. I have no clear sense of what it
is that you are wanting to do with this mixture. (013)
> These might be
>a stretch at the empirical level, not to discount the good work already
>done by the folks a Kestrel on Specware, and given the solid work of
>Barwise, Goguen, Kent & others not so much news at the theoretical level. (014)
Well, the Burstall/Goguen and Kent's is all very
elegant as theory, but what is a lot less clear
is, what is it a theory *of* ? None of it seems
to have any clear connection with any actual
practice. The Kestrel Specware material on the
other hand is clearly useful, but only for very
strongly typed frameworks and only for
programming languages, neither of which seem to
apply to our situation (or at any rate, not to CL
or to ontology languages.) (015)
Pat
--
---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home
40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office
Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax
FL 32502 (850)291 0667 cell
phayesAT-SIGNihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes (016)
_________________________________________________________________
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 (017)
|