Re: [ontolog-forum] [ontology-summit] Estimating number of all known fac

[Simon Spero <sesuncedu@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Christopher Menzel <cmenzel@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:28 PM, LaVern Pritchard <lavern@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

The number of known facts is unknowable because a fact is in the eye of the beholder or a label,

Sez you. What's your theory of facts?  What's a beholder? What's a label? You can't just pull stuff like this out of thin air and expect it to be meaningful.

Oh come on; you are just taking number and known, and unknowable for granted :-P  

I'm not sure that the  original question is answerable without understanding more about the context in which the questioner  asked it, and what kind of answer he was expecting. 

 I think that Leo's citation of the total amounts of bytes stored a few years ago may have come closest to a plausible interpretation- using a little Grice lets one slide by on the assumption that some very approximate finite number was wanted (and not zero or Aleph_n). 

However, even there he was hesitant to suggest how that might relate to the questioners meaning of fact, since if data were meant, its fair to assume that the questioner would have used that term.  

It may be possible to guess at the relationship between stored data and stored information (though most of the reports on the subject are commissioned by companies that sell storage, and for some reason don't distinguish).

The response of the in-house epistemologist to the question was "I don't know." Followed by "it depends".   

A proprietary response might be: 

(define gaf-count () 

  (clet ((count 0))

(do-assertions (assertion)

      (pif (cand (asserted-assertion? assertion)

 (gaf-cnf? (assertion-cnf assertion)))  

     (csetq count (+ count 1))))    

(ret count)))

Simon

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