Gary and William, (01)
GBC
> This reminds me of one of W's famous quotes "Whereof one cannot speak,
> thereof one must be silent." A possible implication is that one should
> approach these topics carefully and manage the quality/quantity ratio as
> if keeping the Sowa lattice idea in mind. (02)
As it happens, I have some slides about those topics in my tutorial
on the "Goal of Language Understanding". (03)
http://www.jfsowa.com/goal.pdf (04)
Slide 62 (copy below) extracts 8 sentences that summarize that book
and its implications for formal ontology. (05)
For further discussion and analysis of the issues, including their
relationship to the lattice of theories, see slides 61 to 103. (06)
WF
> Doug Foxvog hit on the essence of the simple point I am trying to make:
>
> "What kind of argument is it when one references an instance of
> something to deny its existence?" (07)
That is not a simple point at all. Philosophers and logicians have
debated that issue since antiquity. The medieval Scholastics were
very concerned about it -- because issues about the existence and
nature of nonobservable things like God, angels, and souls, were
critical for their theology. (08)
They developed an elegant theory of "supposition" (Latin, suppositio).
Briefly speaking, a supposition could be an entity or a "matter of fact"
in the observable world. But it could also be a nonobservable spirit
that might or might not exist in any world. Or it could be an
imaginary, fictional, or hypothetical entity. (09)
In fact, their theory of supposition has a large overlap with modern
theories of possible worlds and situations. See slide 88 of (010)
http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/kdptut.pdf (011)
Slides 69 to 107 of kdptut.pdf discuss issues that are related,
but mostly complementary to slides 61 to 103 of goal.pdf. For more
about possible worlds, etc., see (012)
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/worlds.pdf (013)
John
__________________________________________________________________________ (014)
Wittgenstein’s First Book (015)
From the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus_ , (016)
1 The world is everything that is the case. (017)
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. (018)
3.25 There is one and only one complete analysis of the proposition. (019)
4.001 The totality of propositions is the language. (020)
4.116 Everything that can be said can be said clearly. (021)
5 Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (022)
6.13 Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. (023)
7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (024)
This book set the agenda for formal semantics in the 20th century. (025)
If it were adequate for language understanding and reasoning,
then the HAL 9000 would be ruling the world today. (026)
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