My copy of Peter Wegner's 1968 Programming Languages, Information Structure, and Machine Organization arrived today.
Scanning this book that I have not seen in years, I am reminded of many points that became foundational in everything I did on these themes.
One – is that a concept is an “information structure” – with a composite synthetic structure that can be mapped and identified (ie, complex information structures are composed of simple information structures – an approach I have heard described as “compositional semantics”). Following the basic elements he defines, I began to see the entire space of conceptual structure in terms of dimensions -- since a dimension can be understood as isomorphic to a very basic information structure (a row vector, essentially an ordered series of cells).
A second point from Wegner -- though perhaps obvious, also seemed quite profound -- is that every information structure “has a physical existence in some information storage medium”. In my reading, this theme goes to “constructivist” theories of mathematics, as per Leopold Kronecker, where the “reality” of some mathematical object is in question unless it can be instantiated in a physical medium or there is some mechanically-reproducible way to create the object. This led me to wonder about “the real number line” (is it “real” or just a mental visualization?), and I kicked around ideas on “the actual number line”, which would be some kind of linear vector of machine addresses at the highest degree of resolution available (most number of decimal places) in that particular medium. This issue, too, goes directly to the “reality is a continuum, concepts are discrete” thesis.
Get these abstractions bolted to the floor. That was my agenda; we can’t trust anything else…
***
Wegner prefaces his book with this Commentary on a Concept of Plato, which goes to the “symbol/reality” issue. What is the mapping between a symbol and the reality it represents? I was fascinated by issues in “modeling languages” (how does an abstract symbol reliably wrap around reality?), and this question is a core issue in testing scientific theory.
Maybe Wegner’s notion of what “a real computer scientist” is should be toned down, but this preface burned deeply into me.
COMMENTARY ON A CONCEPT OF PLATO
“In performing a computation we do not handle objects of the real world, but merely representations of objects. We are like people who live in a cave and perceive objects only by the shadows which they cast upon the walls of the cave. We use the information obtained from studying the form of these shadows to make inferences about the real world.
“However, we are not merely passive observers of shadows cast by real objects. We modify reality and observe the new patterns of shadows cast by the new configuration of objects. We go even further, forgetting altogether about the real objects that cast the shadows, treating the patterns of shadows as physical objects, and studying how patterns of shadows can be transformed and manipulated.
“Information structures are representations of real objects just like shadows on the walls of a cave. The programmer studies how information structures can be transformed and manipulated and in doing so learns something about objects represented by the information structures. However, the real computer scientist falls in love with information structures and studies their properties not only for what they tell him about the real world but because he finds them beautiful.”
- Peter Wegner
Programming Languages, Information Structures, and Machine Organization (McGraw-Hill Computer Science Series, 1968)
Bruce Schuman
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-----Original Message-----
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John F Sowa
Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 8:54 AM
To: [ontolog-forum]
Subject: [ontolog-forum] Barbara Partee on Formal Semantics
I came across a 52-page review of the development of formal semantics, which Barbara Partee published in 2011. See below for the URL and a copy of the concluding paragraph.
Barbara earned a PhD at MIT (Chomsky as thesis adviser) and began teaching linguistics at UCLA, where she joined Richard Montague and Hans Kamp in pioneering work in combining formal semantics with the complexity of NLs. This review is a history of the field by one of the leading developers and promoters.
My major criticism is about the size of the "grain of truth"
by which she minimizes George Lakoff's criticisms. I have a high regard for both Barbara and George. Both of them were graduate students of Chomsky's around the same time, and they both have important points to make (although I prefer Barbara's style to George's sometimes excessive hyperbole).
My very short critique is that Barbara and George are equally correct about the aspects of language they emphasize, and equally wrong about the aspects of the other that they dismiss or minimize. There is, of course, much more that could be said.
John
______________________________________________________________
http://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1056&context=biyclc
FORMAL SEMANTICS: ORIGINS, ISSUES, EARLY IMPACT
by Barbara H. Partee
[Concluding paragraph]
I should note a criticism that comes from Lakoff and other “Cognitive
Linguists”: formal semanticists don’t work on metaphor, because formal semantics is inadequate for dealing with metaphor, and deals only with ’easy’ parts of natural language. There is probably a grain of truth to this, and it is undoubtedly connected with the relative narrowness of treatments of lexical meaning within formal semantics.
(Formal semanticists have a great deal to say about the semantics of “logical words”, and about aspects of the semantics of open-class words that impinge directly on their contribution to compositional meaning, but very little to say about what distinguishes the meanings of open- class words whose more ‘formal’ properties are alike.) I don’t believe that formal semantics will ever account for ‘all of meaning’. But I believe that it does very well at accounting for the truth-conditional core of literal meaning, which is not handled in any explicit way within Cognitive Linguistics. And we’re getting better at solving problems, and there is progress on semantic issues in language typology, language history, language acquisition, pragmatics and discourse, computational linguistic applications, and more. And as the field has made progress, new questions have opened up. I have really not said anything about the work of the last thirty years, and it is that work by which the fruitfulness of the field can best be judged.
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