Re: [ontolog-forum] web-syllogism-and-worldview

[Adrian Walker <adriandwalker@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi John --

Exactly the point I was making. (Except the red herring part).

This was in reply to the folks who wrongly claim that syllogisms are useless.

Besides the Turing argument, please see also the practical applications online at the site below.

                        Cheers,  -- Adrian

Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    Shared use is free

Adrian Walker
Reengineering

On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:07 AM, John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Adrian,

That argument is the reddest of red herrings:

AW> The problem with the "syllogisms will never work" argument

 > is that, if you allow them to be recursive, they have Turing
 > machine power.  That means that they can compute anything that
 > can be computed.

Every major programming language (e.g., FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP,
ALGOL, PL/I, C, C++, C#, Ada, Java, Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.)
has the following two properties:

 1. They have the power of a Turing machine.

 2. It's undecidable whether an arbitrary program written in
    any of those languages will terminate.

Yet properties #1 and #2 have never stopped anybody from using
those languages for major mission-critical applications.  In
fact, today's economy would grind to a halt (not just a recession)
if people stopped using programming languages with the power of
a Turing machine.

John

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