Thomas,
Do you have an available PDF of your book?
I have an interest in speech acts as in assertions in patent
texts. Some of your ideas about speech acts might be inspirational there as
well.
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper,
Rich Cooper,
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
( 9 4 9 ) 5 2 5-5 7 1 2
http://www.EnglishLogicKernel.com
From:
ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Thomas
Johnston
Sent: Saturday, May 02, 2015 1:23 PM
To: Thomas Johnston; Obrst, Leo J.; [ontolog-forum]; [ontolog-forum]
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Watchout Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine
Learning - ZDNet-2015.04.10
And now I can tie my
discussion of temporal data back to Rich's concept of fluents, and to the more
general concept of indexicals.
A valid time period
("state time period" in my book) defines the time period during which
whatever is described by a row in a table was/is/will be in the state ascribed
to it by the columns of that table.
A transaction time period
("inscription time period" in my book) defines the time period which
begins when a row is physically created and ends when the row is logically
deleted (i.e. marked as deleted, but left in the table so that history is
retained).
A speech act time period is
what I called an "assertion time period" in my first book. But that
book was based on the mistaken idea that the time during which someone
was/is/will be willing to assert that the statement made by a row in a table was/is/will
be (in state time) true could substitute for the standard concept of
transaction time.
The substitution extended the
concept of transaction time by allowing rows in tables to be created with
future transaction/assertion time periods. Future transaction time is an
oxymoron, which is why it has always been disallowed. But future assertion time
clearly is not-- thus demonstrating that the two concepts are distinct, and
that I should not have conflated them.
So speech acts are the public
expressions of propositional attitudes. (Don't know if anyone else has put it
that way, but it seems right to me.) The two speech acts relevant to the
management of temporal data are (i) asserting that a row (the
statement/proposition expressed by that inscription) represents
("makes") a true statement, and (ii) withdrawing a previous assertion.
Extension to other
propositional attitudes -- assent, belief, doubt, etc. -- would be useful, I
think, but I only alluded to it in my second book (see especially Ch.19).
The other thing I did in that
second book was provide a metamodel which incorporates statements themselves as
managed object (represented by entities in logical data models, by tables in
databases). I don't know of any other databases that do this. The temporal extent
of a statement, in a set of databases, begins when its first inscription is
created, and ends when its last inscription is deleted.
And, by the same token, that
metamodel incorporates propositional attitudes (associated with the persons or
groups whose attitudes they are, e.g. the attitudes of the corporation who owns
the database) with statements. The temporal extent of a party/propositional
attitude/statement in a set of databases, of course, begins with the first
assertion (or other propositional attitude) of that statement by that party,
and ends with the assertion withdrawal by that party of that statement.
I note also that by reifying
statements themselves (and not just their inscriptions, as is done everywhere
else), it becomes possible to track both inscription (statement token)
provenance, and also statement (type) provenance.
So: fluents. The three time
attached to rows in relational tables resolve three different indexicals
associated with those rows. Lacking such resolution, we all in fact understand
these three kinds of time to be relativized to Now() in non-temporal tables.
For example: let a row in a
Customer table be [C123 | Smith | Platinum], with C123 the primary key,
"Smith" the customer's name, and "Platinum" the customer's
status. We know who we are talking about. But:
- When did/does/will C123 have
that name and that status? i.e. when will C123 be in that state? Standard
bitemporal theory and my own agree on this, but they call it the
"valid time" during which that customer was in that state, and I
call it the "state time". Without state time being explicitly
included in the row, we all understand that what is meant is "right
now" (and until I update the database to indicate a change of C123's
state).
- When did the database include that
row as part of the current information content in that table? (Let's say
that the row was originally entered with "Smythe" instead of
"Smith", and was corrected a week later. For the first week, the
"Smythe" row was part of the then-current information content;
after that week, it no longer was.) Without inscription time being
explicitly included in the row, we all understand what what is meant is
"right now" (and until I update the database).
- Current computer science takes it
(i.e. implicitly assumes) that their transaction time is co-extensive with
my assertion time (now called "speech act time"). But it's not.
We can inscribe a statement token before we are ready to say that it
represents a true statement. So we must be able to enter a row into a table
and somehow specify that our assertion that it makes a true statement is
deferred for some time. But without assertion time, the best we can do is
assume that we will not inscribe a row until we are willing to assert that
it says something true. After a career in commercial IT, I can tell you
that this assumption makes it impossible to express a lot of things in
databases that businesses would ask for (if only they knew enough to ask
for it). Lots of examples, BTW, in both books.
Like anyone with an idea, I
see a lot of possibilities for it. Part 1 of MTRD, plus Chapter 19 are my
currently published expressio of the idea. But by summarizing bits and pieces
of it (another piece is my notion of an upper-level ontology common to all
relational databases, a notion that Matthew West seems skeptical of), I hope to
garner valuable criticism.
On Saturday, May 2, 2015 3:47 PM,
Thomas Johnston <tmj44p@xxxxxxx> wrote:
A more succinct account than
mine, and one that doesn't drop anything out.
Again, I recommend the SEP
article, which will presumably explain the concept as it is used in logic and
in logic-based approaches to semantics.
On Saturday, May 2, 2015 2:41 PM,
"Obrst, Leo J." <lobrst@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I think Thomas is thinking of
indexicals as indexes (contextual indices) that fix a statement (proposition?)
in a particular set of possible worlds.
From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, May 02, 2015 1:06 PM
To: 'Thomas Johnston'; '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Watchout Watson: Here comes Amazon Machine
Learning - ZDNet-2015.04.10
Please define the word
"indexicality" as you are using it. I think you mean the
binding between FOL variables and their substituted constants but the term
itself is not used much in engineering AFAIK.
Chief Technology Officer,
MetaSemantics Corporation
MetaSemantics AT
EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
The classical definition of a
statement, as I understand it, is that it is a declarative sentence with all
indexicals resolved. So, as a statement, a fluent is a statement schema such
that resolving its temporal indexical produces a statement. (If we move on to
propositions, we get into some deep issues, such as whether or not any
propositions can change their truth values over time.) In other words, a fluent
is a family of statements all identical except for the point or period of time
associated with them.
Sounds like an interesting
concept. More generally, we can conceive of a statement-family as a statement
schema in which one or more indexicals are not resolved -- place, time, person,
perhaps even propositional attitude.
Are such statement families
worth reifying? Or is it enough simply to understand that many apparent
statements are not statements because of indexicality?
Rich and Tom,
RC
> I think you are describing what is best represented as fluents in the
> table. A "fluent" row comprises the predicate's specified
value of
> true or false, and its parametric bindings to objects and properties.
TJ
> Which suggests that I must currently fail to understand what you mean
> by "fluents". Can you enlighten me?
The term 'fluent' was introduced by John McCarthy and Pat Hayes in the
classic paper "Some philosophical problems from the standpoint of
AI":
JMC & PJH (1969) http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/mcchay69.pdf
> A fluent is a function whose domain is the space Sit of situations.
For example, the sentence "It is raining" is a _propositional
fluent_.
For any situation in which it is raining, that fluent has value true.
Another fluent is the phrase 'the president', which depends on the
organization and the time. For the situation of the USA at this moment,
the value of that fluent is a human named Barack Obama.
The term 'fluent' is a useful generic for many terms that have the
modifier 'context dependent'. For related documents, search for the
word 'context' in http://www.jfsowa.com/ikl/
.
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