----- Original Message -----
From: "Christopher Menzel" <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum] " <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, March 17, 2009 10:38 AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] mKR programming language (01)
>> You seem to imply that mKR is of no value without a formal semantic
>> theory. I totally disagree.
>
> That much is clear. :-)
>
>> Further, I assert that there are many meaningful exchanges taking
>> place in this forum, even though we have no formal semantics for
>> English.
>
> Of course, but we have all learned English by being socialized into
> various linguistic communities wherein the semantic conventions of
> English have already been assimilated. It is, of course, logically
> possible that large communities of people sit down and hash out the
> meanings of the mKR constructs informally and start adding them to the
> way they speak and write -- although, as noted above, there seems
> little reason to do so, as English appears to be doing just fine as a
> medium of spoken and written communication between human agents in
> most contexts. But once again, if you want mKR to be of general use
> as an ontology language that helps us to leverage high-speed computer
> networks to share, integrate, and reason upon large bodies of
> information, then mKR needs a formal semantics that (i) fixes the
> meanings of its primitive constructs and (ii) assigns definite
> meanings to complex expressions recursively in terms of the meanings
> of their simpler parts. Without this it is impossible to guarantee
> that information has been exchanged and integrated accurately and that
> inferences drawn on the basis of that information are sound.
>
> Chris Menzel
>
I am relying on the "linguistic communities wherein the semantic
conventions of English have already been assimilated". (02)
I have stated, on my web site, that the meaning of an mKR proposition
is defined by the meaning of its English paraphrase.
I do not consider many pages of mathematical formulas to be an
appropriate definition of meaning in mKR. (03)
Dick McCullough
http://mkrmke.org (04)
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