Please forgive me, in advance, for my spotty knowledge of some of the topics
in this post. My interest in these ideas often exceeds my understanding. (01)
First, congratulations to all on the ISO adoption of CL as a standard. I
believe it will prove to be an invaluable addition to the spread of
interoperable knowledge representation technology. It is an important
achievement. I am doubly excited by this because it includes, at long last,
an ISO standard for Conceptual Graphs. CGs was the first knowledge
representation formalism I encountered. I read the CG1984 book several
times, worked on an implementation in prolog of a linear form, and then had
the pleasure to participate for a short time in 1997 on work towards the
CGIF standard specification. More recently, having decided that semantics is
heavily dependent on contexts, and searching for material concerning that
subject, I came across IKL and the startling claim that "Every occurrence of
an IKL name has the same meaning." This is something I find highly
desirable, but which as I said, I had just recently decided was not
possible. (02)
The topic I am particularly interested in discussing here now, is this claim
and a similar statement in the CL requirements section 5.1.4.b., "Any piece
of Common Logic text should have the same meaning, and support the same
entailments everywhere on the network. Every name should have the same
logical meaning at every node of the network." Yet in the version of the
Common Logic (CL) specification I have, in section 1 I read "The following
are outside the scope of this standard: ... Computer-based operational
methods of providing relationships between symbols in the logical 'universe
of discourse' and individuals in the 'real world'". (03)
This topic, the operational relationship between symbols in logic and
individuals in the world, happens to be my particular interest of late.
Actually, come to think of it, I have been interested in this for some time
and I recall that one of the many things that impressed me about John Sowa's
first book on Conceptual Structures in 1984 was the chapter on Psychological
Evidence, including the discussion of perceptrons. That section was, at
least an initial attempt, to address the question. (04)
So here is my first question: If the semantics of CL starts out with a
mapping from the vocabulary of a CL text to individuals in the universe of
discourse, but this mapping is nowhere encoded or included in the CL text,
then how can you be sure that one agents mapping to individuals at one node
of the network will be the same as the mapping of another agent at some
other node of the network? (05)
John Black
www.kashori.com (06)
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