On Feb 25, 2010, at 10:54 AM, John Bottoms wrote:
> Pat Hayes wrote:
>>> There are real meanings in the world, let us
>>> agree. Some things out there really do mean something.
>
> Pat,
> I'm not sure why you expressed it the way you did but I have
> a different view of meanings. Perhaps you were being prosaic
> and if so then please bear with me. The forum has a wide range
> of views and some people are working on different types of
> intelligence from others.
>
> To me meanings don't occur in the world, they occur in the mind. (01)
There is no denying that each of us attaches her or his own private
connotations to words, but stuff that is locked away in our individual heads
leaves us with no foundation whatever for computational ontology. Tarski-style
semantics provides us with a compelling and rigorous theory of objective
meanings to ground objective notions of truth and logical consequence and hence
with a foundation for writing, sharing, and reasoning upon ontologies. I'm not
suggesting that the stuff in the head be ignored -- it is no doubt connected to
all sorts of "softer" psychological, cultural, and interpersonal phenomena that
might need to be taken into account in extracting an ontology out of a
gov/biz/mil/etc organization -- but it is only a piece (in my view, a
relatively minor piece) of the much larger picture of ontological engineering. (02)
Chris Menzel (03)
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