JS: "When you first contacted me, you seemed to be an intelligent person who
had been doing some hard work." (01)
John, the first impression is rarely wrong. Richard likes work, and he works
much, really much. (02)
Humans, as all things, have two kinds of properties: essential properties,
characteristic of their natural kind, and idiosyncratic properties, making
them unique individuals. Here is a kind of paradox, the more intelligent
creature, the more he is idiosyncratic, with a highly individual style of
thinking, style of writing, style of speeking, and style of creation. It is
said that the best artists marked by the highly idiosyncratic style of
painting, as Michelangelo. The same rule seemingly refers to the best
scholars, engineers, programmers, technologists, businesmen, and
politicians. (03)
We all have our peculiarities, specialties. But such a singularity makes us
unique, sometimes eccentrically unique. What is critical is what unites us
all as a great intelligent community, the intellectual commitment to the big
cause [of commonly agreed model of reference ontology of things and
meanings.] (04)
Re. the matter of context. Although its meaning is more complicated, i don't
see any decisive difference between these two views: (05)
JS: C is a conjunction of propositions called the context; (06)
RM: Context is a list of propositions. (07)
There seems no principal reason for any principal disagreement, except our
idiosyncrasies. (08)
Azamat Abdoullaev (09)
----- Original Message -----
From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "[ontolog-forum]" <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "Cyclify Austin" <cyclify-austin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "KR-language"
<KR-language@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 29, 2009 7:10 AM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Past, Present, and Future of Ontology (010)
> Dear Matthew and Dick,
>
> MW> I agree that context is used for what you cannot be bothered to
> > make explicit, and the answer is simple -- be bothered to make it
> > explicit, then you have no need for context.
>
> To a certain extent, that is true. Many different theories of context
> have been developed, and all of them share one common feature: they
> use metalanguage to say something along the following lines:
>
> 1. p is the proposition or sentence at the focus of attention.
>
> 2. C is a conjunction of propositions called the context.
>
> 3. p is related to C by certain relations r1, r2, ...
>
> Most languages that deal with context state that kind of information,
> and they also specify rules of inference for reasoning about that
> information.
>
> MW> I think "context" is way over in the woolly corner and needs
> > some disambiguation, deconfliction and deconstruction (and
> > probably some other words beginning with "d") before it can live
> > in anyone's ontology.
>
> What makes context so woolly is the very difficult problem of
> extracting or distinguishing the proposition p, the context C,
> and the relations from some natural language text or dialog.
>
> In addition to the basic problems of natural language processing,
> which are by no means simple, you must, for each sentence, determine
> what is the proposition p, how much of the surrounding verbiage and
> the nonlinguistic environment should be considered the context C,
> and what are the relations between p and C. After you've done
> all that analysis, then and only then can you map the results to
> the neat formalism called a context language.
>
> I agree that the process is uncertain and woolly.
>
> RHM> I do appreciate your sporadic attempts to encourage me.
>
> Thank you. When you first contacted me, you seemed to be an intelligent
> person who had been doing some hard work. I am always willing to help
> bright people who honestly want to learn.
>
> But when you claimed that the work you did in the past 5 years with
> no prior study in the field was the equivalent of what all the people
> working on Cyc had done in the past 25 years, that was so ridiculous
> that it immediately classified you as a crank.
>
> Even Newton said that he was standing on the shoulders of giants.
> Anybody who claims to start from scratch and reinvent everything
> is just a crank.
>
> And by the way, I am not saying that as an academic. I also spent
> 30 years working for IBM, at which I was expected to do something
> that might contribute to the bottom line. And I am now president
> of a small company (VivoMind Intelligence, Inc) which is actually
> producing software that people are willing to pay money for.
>
> RHM> Syntactically, context is represented in the mKR language as
> >
> > at space = s, time = t, view = v { sentence; };
> >
> > where s, t, v is the context of the sentence. v is the name of
> > the context, which is implemented as a complex data structure
> > in the mKE program. s, t name the space-time coordinates which
> > are applicable when sentence involves a "physical" situation
> > such as an action or interaction.
>
> This kind of representation falls right in the middle of the road
> of the kinds of things that many people have been doing. It has
> the three parts: proposition p, context C, and relations space,
> time, and view. But it lacks the rules of inference that specify
> what kinds of reasoning can be performed on that notation. Your
> statement about the "complex data structure" v is also rather
> woolly and requires a more precise specification.
>
> What Pat, Chris, and I have found very irritating is that you keep
> making grandiose claims about having a context language that solves
> all the world's problems. But in fact, it's similar to what other
> people have been doing for the past 30 years or more. Unlike those
> other systems, your specification lacks rules of inference.
>
> RHM> I think in human terms. Start with a "tabula rasa" brain --
> > where the only propositions are those which correspond to the
> > structure of the human brain, which recognizes "existent", "entity",
> > "part", "attribute", etc. Then progressively, fill in the context
> > with all the propositions which represent the human's sensory
> > experiences of the external world, and his thinking about those
> > experiences.
>
> In Matthew's words, that is truly woolly. Aristotle was also thinking
> in human terms, but he was a very careful analyst. In his books on
> interpretation and the psyche, he went into great detail about all
> those issues. In the past two millennia, the greatest philosophers,
> psychologists, linguists, and neurophysiologists have gone considerably
> further, yet many unsolved problems still remain.
>
> You can do good work in areas of your expertise without having studied
> all those writings. But when you claim that your woolly paragraph
> is somehow superior to those two millennia of research, you make
> yourself sound like the crankiest of cranks.
>
> Suggestion: If you stick to the syntactic and semantic details of
> specifying your notation and defining what it means in computable
> terms, then there's something we can usefully discuss.
>
> But when you make grandiose claims that your thoughts are somehow
> superior to all those publications you have never read, then we
> just dismiss you as a crank.
>
> John
>
>
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