On Feb 2, 2011, at 7:50 AM, John Bottoms wrote:
I've been thinking for a while that we need a "Where Do I Put..."
thread. It will cover suggestions on where to put those fussy little
things that are not covered in ontological discussions. Do you have any
of these types of questions?
I recognize that there are many ways to organize an ontology, but
clearly if access is by structure, rather than by indexical, then we
should recognize and promote the more efficient structures.
Where Do I Put...??
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1. Gõedel numbers and other formulas?
Puzzling question. First, Gödel numbers are not formulas; they are, as the label suggests, numbers. Second, there are no Gödel numbers per se. Rather, it only makes sense to call a number a Gödel number relative to a Gödel numbering, i.e., a completely conventional assignment of numbers to the basic syntactic elements of a formal language. Gödel numberings, and the Gödel numbers they generate, are purely theoretical constructs used for proving some rather advanced theorems in mathematics (notably, of course, Gödel's incompleteness theorems). I myself can't envision any scenario under which one would have to worry about where to "put" them in the course of building an ontology (whatever exactly "putting" is supposed to mean).
(...and are data encoded using Church's approach?)
What is Church's approach?