On Jun 30, 2009, at 2:43 PM, Ronald Stamper wrote:
> Perhaps I have misunderstood the discussion but it appears to
> concern the use of languages, especially forms of logic, to solve
> problems of meaning.
>
> You can do that with FOL provided that you are prepared to deal only
> with the self-contained world to which it gives access.
>
I have no idea what you mean by a "self-contained world", but there
are no restrictions whatsoever on the subject matter that can be
represented in FOL (though it may not be the most appropriate logic
for certain domains, e.g., quantum mechanics).
> Kowalsik put it clearly on p.9 of his book “Logic for Problem
> Solving”:
>
> ‘It follows that it is unnecessary to talk about meaning at all.
> All talk about meaning can be reexpressed in terms of logical
> implication.’
>
> To us this declared their retreat into either a world of pure
> symbol manipulation or a rarefied Platonic reality accessible to
> some privileged minds.
>
I suspect you are grossly misinterpreting the remark. I don't have
the book in question, but one natural, and fairly innocuous,
interpretation is simply that the meaning of a sentence (in a given
theory) is characterized by the set of sentences it logically
implies. This is more or less the axiomatic approach to ontologies.
> So: no semantics without ontology
>
Well, that depends on the kind of semantics you have in mind. If your
purpose is simply to provide a semantics for the basic operators of
FOL — which is all the basic model theory of FOL purports to do — then
you don't really need any specific ontology at all.
> and no semantics without responsible agents.
>
Simply false for the semantics of first-order logic. Perhaps true if
you have a different notion of semantics in mind.
> For work on semantics, do we not need a kind of logic that keeps the
> agents in the picture?
>
Again, it depends on what you mean by "semantics". There is so much
that falls under that term that the question as it stands is simply
ill-formed. This literature on logic-based approaches to agency is
absolutely huge.
> one that starts from responsibility and existence as primitives and
> then leads to truth and falsity as derived concepts. I guess that
> it will resemble FOL with a twist.
>
Maybe. Show us a theory. (01)
-chris (02)
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