+1
I think that we are very close to demonstrating the ability to record
the flows-that's an important term emerging in social computing--of
beliefs, justification of those beliefs, and arguments surrounding
those beliefs, all online. (01)
Jack (02)
On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 7:33 AM, Ron Wheeler
<rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Longer than 10 lines please summarize on the wiki.
>
> This forum seems to be an example of life before the invention of writing.
> We sit around the campfire exchanging ideas in a form which is
> reminiscent of traditional verbal life.
> We hope that everyone eventually comes to a common tradition of
> ontological understanding through repetition as each newcomer arrives.
>
> With the invention of writing and books, humans began to have more
> efficient ways to record and transmit knowledge.
> Can we get to that level in this forum before we get too far behind the
> rest of the world?
>
> Lets start documenting what we believe as a group in a permanent form.
> With modern technology we can document common beliefs, dissent and open
> questions.
>
>
> Ron
>
> John F. Sowa wrote:
>> Pat C, Pat H, and Ron,
>>
>> RW> [Pat H's reply to Pat C] does look like some things worth keeping
>> > for more than the time it takes to read an e-mail and press delete.
>>
>> I agree. I'd just like to summarize and emphasize a few points.
>> In the following summary, the quoted sentences are by Pat H, and
>> the unquoted sentences are by me.
>>
>> 1. "Tarskian semantics... is a very general theory of meaning, one
>> that can be applied to a wide range of languages and notations."
>>
>> Yes indeed. In fact, *every* theory of formal ontology that anyone
>> has proposed in the past half century is based on a Tarski-style
>> semantics. That includes Cyc, SUMO, BFO, Dolce, etc., etc., etc.
>> It also includes the semantics for every digital system (hardware
>> or software) that has ever been designed and built since the 1940s
>> -- including those for which the designers had no idea what a
>> formal semantics is or might be.
>>
>> 2. "It is just wrong to draw the contrast between the natural things,
>> on the one hand, and the account provided of those things by a
>> theory of them, on the other, as a difference of **kind**."
>>
>> Yes. Every statement in logic is absolutely precise. The common
>> words used to define the subject in Longman's dictionary (or any
>> other dictionary written by lexicographers for human readers) are
>> usually rather vague and shift their meanings slightly from one
>> definition to the next. But that vague cloud of meaning *includes*
>> the formally defined meaning. The vague meaning covers more cases
>> and it has a fuzzier boundary, but each precise meaning contained
>> in the could is just one very sharply defined sense of the same
>> nature as any other word sense in the cloud.
>>
>> 3. "Computational ontologies are artifacts, written in formal logical
>> notations."
>>
>> Although I agree with that statement, I suspect that Pat C was
>> claiming that programs have some meaning other than what is
>> captured in a formal logic. But it is important to distinguish
>> a declarative statement (in a usual logic) from an imperative
>> statement, such as a command or a machine instruction. But every
>> machine instruction and every program written for a digital
>> computer can be completely defined in the following form:
>>
>> Preconditions, Action, Postconditions.
>>
>> The preconditions and postconditions are statements in logic,
>> which can be formally defined by a Tarski-style semantics.
>> The preconditions describe the state of the computer system
>> before the action, which may be a single machine instruction
>> or an arbitrarily large program composed of many instructions.
>> And the postconditions define the state after the action.
>>
>> The action itself has no meaning outside what can be described in
>> the logic used to state the preconditions and the postconditions.
>> The human commentary may explain what the programmer or designer
>> had intended, but if there is any discrepancy between the comments
>> and the program, there is a bug (or *issue* as MSFT calls it).
>>
>> Pat C has repeatedly made the following claim to justify his search
>> for primitives:
>>
>> PC>> So, if we want the meanings of terms in an ontology to remain
>> >> stable, and **don't** want the meanings to change any time some
>> >> remotely related type appears in a new axiom...
>>
>> PH> But we DO want this! Surely that is the very point of changing
>> > and adding axioms. If meanings are stable across theories, then
>> > what is the point of adding axioms to capture more meaning?
>>
>> I'd like to clarify the kind of change that occurs when more axioms
>> are added. Each addition of an axiom to a theory is a specialization.
>> The change it makes *narrows* the meaning of the terms in it. For
>> example, the term 'Animal' is very broad. By adding more qualifiers
>> (axioms), the meaning can be specialized to 'Dog'. Further axioms
>> can narrow it to 'Poodle'.
>>
>> Those are certainly changes, but they don't go outside the cloud
>> of meaning of the original term. In fact, every dictionary written
>> for human consumption uses such definitions.
>>
>> John
>>
>>
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