Re: [ontolog-forum] Next steps in using ontologies as standards

[FERENC KOVACS <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear John

 

You see the world through a tube. There is a lot more out there in understanding this world and human language processing than trying to describe in terms of formal logic. In fact, you do not need a language to understand the world to a large extent. Moreover, you do not have to speak a language syntactically correctly to get by. You should understand that knowledge is an ordered acces to information and knowledge representations in natuaral languages are NOT accessible in an ordered fashion, not even the books in the libraries. Why not? Because they are morphologically sorted, that is alphabetical indexes are the search/keyword tools and no matter what you do about them in compiling thesaurii or ontologies you still have the same problem.

You do not see that all the words you use are names of concepts, and concepts are all abstract, there is no such thing as an abstract concept and a concrete concept, etc. Knowledge is the level of failiarity with the mental operations and their results in nterms of objects, properties and relations, all concepts, all products of conceptualization by the mind, but not unambiguous, on the contrary, most of the time the have ambiguous senses and sometimes triples senses. You need to understand this, otherwise you never get out of your tunnel.

What you try to achieve in formal languages and codi8ng is all lost in translation anyway.Your computer is in front of you, after compiling your program the machine code shows nothing of the efforts you have been making. All you get is an output and an input, but what goes on in the mind in between has certainly nothing to do with mapping, especially not in 2D or more Ds.

Please, read the book entitled the Topos of Music, you will get a better understanding of what I am saying. (I would hate to recommend my writings or ideas to read now, and they are only available for perks, anyway. I am not a charity from now on. :-) )

http://www.springer.com/birkhauser/mathematics/book/978-3-7643-5731-3

 

Cheers, Frank

 

 Vasco and Frank,

The problem of multiple senses for nearly all words in natural languages
makes them informal.  When NL words are inserted into formal languages
(e.g., in controlled NLs such as Aristotle's syllogisms), the sense
must be specified by some declaration or stipulation.

JFS>> For example, following is the *form* of the pattern named Barbara:
>>
>>    Every A is a B.
>>    Every B is a C.
>>    Therefore, every A is a C.
>>
>> When the letters A, B, and C are replaced by arbitrary common nouns,
>> the interpretation of the syllogism is uniquely determined --
>> provided that the middle term B is required to apply to exactly
>> the same individuals in both premises.

VCP> By saying "provided X" aren't we introducing background knowledge?
> I.E aren't we considering background knowledge implicitly?
>
> In the absurd we could say
>
>  "Every lightning rod is a conductor"
>  "Every conductor studied music"
>  "Therefore, every lightning rod studied music"

The word 'conductor' has multiple word senses.  In one sense, it means
something that conducts electricity.  In another sense, it means a
person who conducts an orchestra.  If the word sense can vary between
premise #1 and premise #2, that introduces a fallacy called the
'nondistributed middle term' -- i.e., the word 'conductor' has
different extensions in each premise.

To solve this problem, the complete _expression_ of the syllogism must
include a declaration of word sense for each noun in the syllogism.

VCP> Aren't we introducing the background knowledge of the word
> 'lightning rod' in determining why this is false?

There are two aspects to meaning:  intension and extension.  The
intension of any statement is an abstract pattern.  The extension
is determined by matching that pattern to the domain (which may
be some aspect of the world, an abstract model, or some possible
world).  The intension is determined when the pattern of the
logic (in this case, the syllogism) is stated and each term of
the syllogism is mapped to a unique definition (e.g., by stating
the URI of some specification).  The extension is determined by
using the pattern and the URIs of each term to determine the
truth value.

FK> Your ontologies are a mess...

I certainly agree that many of the things that are called
"ontology" are a mess -- and they've been getting worse, not
better, in the past ten years.

John Sowa


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