Steven, (01)
That's an excellent point: (02)
SEZ
> In your "ontological" terms I'm sure that Peirce's assertion
> about meaning and individuals is appropriate; i.e., all definitions
> should be attributed and never detached from their author. (03)
Following is Peirce's statement of symbol grounding. He said much
more in his voluminous writings, but this is a widely quoted summary: (04)
Peirce, Collected Papers 5.212:
> The elements of every concept enter into logical thought at the gate
> of perception and make their exit at the gate of purposive action;
> and whatever cannot show its passports at both those two gates is
> to be arrested as unauthorized by reason. (05)
And Peirce was also an associate editor of the _Century Dictionary_,
for which he wrote, revised, or edited over 16,000 definitions.
That gave him a practical view of what it means to define a word. (06)
The issues of attribution, citation, derivation (by any form of
reasoning) are critical. There was a good PBS program about the
way Conan Doyle revolutionized forensic investigations with his
Sherlock Holmes stories. 19th and early 20th century investigations
were sloppy to say the least, and those stories set a standard that
was much, much higher than the practice. (07)
And by the way, the taxonomy for the Wikipedia has over 100K OWL
classes. But the precision claimed for OWL cannot be any better
than what goes into the sources and what methods are used to
derive "triples" and "definitions" from those sources. (08)
Even if every so-called "fact" has a citation, how many of those
citations have been verified? How many of the sources have been
checked to see whether the cited fact corresponds to what was
said in the source? What was the quality of the source? Did the
person who wrote the Wikipedia entry understand the source *and*
the OWL definition *and* the relationship between the two? How
many contributors had any idea that such definitions existed?
And how were the DBpedia entries derived from the Wikipedia? (09)
All databases of any kind have errors. An insurance company had
a computer crash that destroyed a significant part of their DB.
They decided that the cost of recreating that data was greater
than the cost of just paying any claims that needed the data.
So they never fixed the part that was corrupted. (010)
I believe that people who do forensic investigations, audit trails,
and such have a more robust (and cynical) view of symbol grounding
than many people who publish philosophical papers about the topic. (011)
John (012)
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