Many thanks for the reference, Pat. I will check this out ! (01)
Patrick Cassidy wrote:
> Rick,
> There is an interpretation of "meaning" that I find useful in the paper
> by William Woods "Meaning and Links" in the Winter 2007 issue of AI Magazine
> (vol. 28 no. 4) which he calls "Procedural Semantics". Simplified, his
> interpretation requires that there must be some executable procedure that
> can verify the truth of a statement or the membership of some entity in the
> set of instances of a type, in order for a machine to actually be able to
> grasp "meaning".
>
> "In this theory the meaning of a noun is
> a procedure for recognizing or generating
> instances, the meaning of a proposition is a
> procedure for determining if it is true or false,
> and the meaning of an action is the ability to
> do the action or to tell if it has been done."
>
> This assumes that the machine is equipped with some sensorimotor
> capabilities that would allow it to test conditions in the real world.
> There are existing capabilities in typical computers, such as being able to
> go out onto the Web and find text and pictures, that could substitute for
> being able to walk around and inspect things at a close distance.
>
> This notion of meaning avoids the infinite loop of trying to interpret
> symbols in a computer in terms of other symbols in a computer. He actually
> introduced this notion back in the 70's.
>
> Pat
>
> Patrick Cassidy
> MICRA, Inc.
> 908-561-3416
> cell: 908-565-4053
> cassidy@xxxxxxxxx
>
>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-
>> bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2008 11:44 AM
>> To: [ontolog-forum]
>> Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] A different approach to ontology
>>
>> John, Pat, Chris & All:
>>
>> Over the past few months I've been a bit of a bookworm trying to better
>> understand interpretation and meaning. I have a few questions about a)
>> RDF and CL interpretations and b) what Jospeh Goguen called "a
>> relational theory of meaning" here ...
>>
>> http://cse.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/notn.ps
>>
>> Many thanks in advance for your time in answering my questions.
>>
>> John F. Sowa wrote:
>>> I received the following offline question:
>>>
>>>> I don't have it clear in my mind why a formal ontology
>>>> (a particular method of documenting relationships)
>>>> would be "a prerequisite for a formal language that
>>>> says anything meaningful about any subject domain."
>>> The words or other symbols must have some connection to
>>> the world in order to make any statement about any aspect
>>> of the world (i.e., some subject domain).
>> The RDF semantics states a) that it restricts meaning to what "can be
>> captured in mechanical inference rules" and b) that equates a
>> particular
>> world with an interpretation.
>>
>> The papers I've seen on possible worlds seem to cover a wide variety of
>> other topics like, necessity, possibility, etc ...
>>
>> http://www-csli.stanford.edu/~jperry/PHILPAPERS/posswld.pdf
>>
>> Would you happen to have a reference to an academic paper the defines
>> an
>> interpretation as a world ?
>>
>> I've read Tarski's Semantic Conception of Truth which defines truth as
>> material adequacy, but this definition seems to require structures
>> derived from sentences to "fully interpret" the sentences they
>> represent.
>>
>> CL model theory doesn't make the same claim: that an interpretation is
>> a
>> world. Why ?
>>
>>> If the symbols don't have any such connection, you have
>>> a meaningless formal language such as the list of
>>> strings Chris Menzel mentioned: ab, aabb, aaabbb, ...
>>> Some such strings might be interesting to analyze,
>>> but they don't say anything. They're formal, but
>>> they're as irrelevant to anything in the world as
>>> a game of chess or a Sudoku puzzle.
>> Is it fair to say that vocabularies that satisfy interpretations under
>> RDF and CL allow us to extend meaning with to what Goguen called
>> representational and relational theories or meaning. For example, in a
>> semiotic vocabulary in which various signs without interpretants could
>> satisfy a representational theory of meaning, Then interpretants could
>> satisfy for relational theory of meaning?
>>
>> Again, many thanks in advance !
>>
>>> John Sowa
>>>
>>>
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>>>
>> --
>> Thanks Rick,
>> blog http://spout.rickmurphy.org
>> web http://www.rickmurphy.org
>> cell 703-201-9129
>>
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>
>
> (02)
--
Thanks Rick,
blog http://phaneron.rickmurphy.org
web http://www.rickmurphy.org
cell 703-201-9129 (03)
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