Hi Lenya, (01)
I think the more "solid ground" you seek is underneath the problem as
it is currently seen, so to speak. (02)
In a putative thread posted on Feb 11, "Knowledge as perspective" I
sketched what I think should happen: (03)
"To try and be a little concrete for a minute, what this means in terms
of the Web is that the Web itself (by virtue of its randomness) is the
most compact representation of the knowledge it contains. We should
keep the Web and expand out the knowledge it contains as different
combinations of its parts, as we need them. (04)
In fact, of course, that is what the most successful "knowledge
applications" of our day, search engines, do already. (05)
With a little theory to back it up, we could do better. Search engines
today find only very crude patterns in text. They find the patterns
identified by sets of words, but there is no structure to them. (06)
We have ways of finding structure, but we've been confused because the
structure we find is always partial. (07)
Our mistake has been to focus on the structure itself, rather than the
process of finding it. Understand we can only expect partial
structure, that this is the sign of a more powerful system, and it
shouldn't be too difficult to find the structure relevant to any given
problem, when we need it." (08)
-Rob (09)
On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 6:27 AM, <lenya@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> As I follow this discussion for a while now I feel almost like I am about to
>interupt a private conversation. But I am going to do that anyway! I am an
>engineer - not a scientist or phylosopher, but I am very interested in this
>subject. Here are my 50 cents, anyway:
>
> It appears to me that this discussion started from the need to have a common
>ground that is more solid than one afforded by established processes. It is
>clear from everything said so far that there is no way to establish a
>universal ground, even when all efforts are made to remove ambiguities, such
>as the case with mathematics. Perhaps it is what Pifagor (or was it someone
>else?) meant when he said something like "... give me a ground and I will
>overturn the World". SO what we should be looking for is at best a temporary
>grounding of our ideas and efforts. This is what Kuhn's paradigm is all about.
> So the question should be (correct me if I am wrong): what are the
>mechanisms available to us for better grounding. Now I really sound like an
>engineer.
> I this was a question discussed here all along, then I appollogize for
>stating the obvious.
>
> Clearly - ontology and language are parts of any such mechanism, and the
>logic must make it parts fit and do the work, which in my mind is to server
>some purpose. Was it Wittgenstein who said that language is the use? I found
>this book about Wittgenstein with the name pointing in the same direction
> "Language and Information: ?Back to the Rough Ground!"
> http://www.springerlink.com/content/tfc9cblgnlwndygl/ (010)
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