[ontolog-forum] language vs logic - ambiguity and starting with definiti

[FERENC KOVACS <f.kovacs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rich,

 I am only commenting points that I believe are related to my points.

There are two ways to go.  You can believe you ALREADY know truth and start with classes to build instantiated objects, or you can start with objects, and group them into classes so that the objects and classes can be validated.

Ferenc:

In the beginning (and for the rest of your life) you have not idea of what truth is. You may know however what existence is through using your senses, including your common sense. By practicing your common sense you will find out something in terms of knowledge before you can speak. When you know how to speak you follow a fast process to select from your (acquired) repertory of a NLs to share something (to give an account of) with your partner who as a unit determine your wording to complete a communication act the quality of which is judged by mutual understanding.This is at the same time a process of earning about the world, and if we are lucky it is a dialogue or dialectics as it were, a fairly disciplined course of exchanging ideas while checking everything left unclear or incomplete, unproven, etc.

When you first have an encounter with something (let us call it an object) you first check out if you know it and if it exists (or real). If you do not know it, you have got to learn about it. By doing so, you have some automatisms, such as seeing an object in terms of form and content. If you can visually define the object as a whole, then you recognize its form, if you cannot, you recognize its content.

Knowing its content is knowing a property, ultimately and if nothing else can be inferred, this property is existence (in this form a shorthand, in proper  word class is existing, existed)

You also and immediately also see this new thingie in terms of it being specific and generic.If you see it for the first time, it is specific (to you), but you also automatically assume that whatever that is, the next one will be the same or similar, in other words you expect a class to emerge later.

Now to be able to remember this encounter later, you must verbally identify the thingie by using the name giving techniques and procedures available to you in that environment.  I do not want to expand on that.

IMHO, the second way is far superior, and certainly more realistic in most practical applications.  Assuming you know everything about the classes to begin with is very misleading and causes you to find exactly what you imagined instead of exactly what is there.  That is the way human infants seem to learn. 

Ferenc:

So as a result of an encounter you will have a form defined in terms of a name and in terms of a mental replica of some sort of the physical thingie. The content of this form is an incomplete list of properties staring with the most generic existence and any other you ma be able to abstract, experience, discover, etc. in other words relations and mental operations suggested by the verbs listed above as an example.

Why should a set of axioms, though usually small enough in number to conveniently support a theory, be expected to correctly enumerate the details unless the topic is some abstruse, but utterly simle mathematical theory. 

I  do not feel compelled to do that. I have not even dealt with another template called quality and quantity.And I am going to skip that for the sake of brevity. (No to mention the mental activity of counting.)

I prefer a realistic appraisal of reality that ends up in a math model, as compared to starting with a math model that ends up missing reality and being unable to prove or disprove the objects' memberships.

I believe you.In fact I endorse you.

I'm not sure what you mean by an ontology exploding.  Do you mean

deriving all statements which are derivable from the initial statements

in the ontology?

FK: NO

 

If so, i would suggest that this "explosion" could be carried out by

formal logical operations -- they wouldn't need to be mental operations.

FK Negative. My suggestion is something else

 

So long as the formal logical operations are not confused with the reality of objects actually experienced.  Yet again, the theory is only approximate, and was chosen by someone with limited personal experience in most cases.  With the learning curve (see the book "Bionomics"), every doubling of experience leads to about a twenty percent improvement in efficacy. 

You read loud and clear

Jill threw a fit and jumped up on the lawn chair when she saw the toad cross the road toward her.  Examples abound in common corpora, so why axiomatize everything at the beginning when you can take into account the actual usage of the language, which is dependent on so many factors - the speaker, her cultural background, her experiences, goals, values, perceptions, and all those things that are NOT axiomatizable in realistic practice

Ferenc:
Yes, you are right. Why? I did not suggest that.

I think that is Ferenc's point - logic is not enough to explain language use.  More is needed.  (Ferenc, correct me if my assumption is not what you meant.) 

Absolulety agreed

 

 

Why can't a message tell merely a portion of a fact, instead of being

complete?

 

I have to agree with Doug on this one.  Many statements only make partial sense, and some make no sense at all.  So interpretation is a very subjective process that, IMHO, may not even be possible to formulate without great loss of information compared to the glorious ambiguity of language.

Ferenc

I am not interested in any statement meant or suitable to fool you, deceive you, etc. including so called facts of science or Íogic for that matter. Interpretation is subjective, that is a fact of life. What we can do is have a dialogue and using the same framework for interpretation. The closer we are in time and space the higher chance we experience similar things and interpret them similarly enough to come to an agreement, especially when w have a method or tool to guide us through such process of negotiating.If we are not lucky, we need to use translators, such as me :-))

"Do you want fries with that?"

"No."

 

There are no verbs in the second "sentence", no person, number, tense, gender or "other linguistic features", but it makes perfect sense to customers who drive through a fast food window lane millions of times per day. 

Ferenc: Yes, because context and the length or type of message are in reverse proportion.You are familiar with elypsis too, I guess..  

I think the difference is in acknowledging the subjectivity and inherent limits on formalizing language.  John Sowa has explained a lot about how language and logic are not fully integratable in the distant past on this list.  Now might be a time to bring this information out again, so we can look at the Peircean view of logic and language in more depth.

Ferenc

My points are NOT about formalizing languages, but showing a different sort of semantic analysis with a different set of core ontology categories.

Thanks a lot!!!!

Ferenc

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