SUO: Re: Starter KB V2 Question #8
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
Chris,
I am still experiencing a certain amount of
"mental tunnel vision" (MTV), so I will try
to chip away at this stuff piece by piece
until I can remember what, if anything,
the "sehr tief" part of it was.
Chris Menzel wrote:
>
...
>
> But *maybe*, just maybe, we are not so far apart, and you really
> had something like this in mind when you wrote the following about
> *resolving* ambiguities (rather than embracing them, as you first
> seemed to indicate):
>
> > My own work and experience have taught me that there is
> > no alternative to depending on intelligent interpreters
> > to resolve -- fallibly, inexactly, non-deterministically --
> > the ambiguities that they need to resolve in order to act,
> > and that all of these attempts to reduce pragmatics, that is,
> > semantics plus semiotics, to syntax, which is what this sort
> > of project is really all about, the desire to arrange some
> > purely syntactic scheme of epicycles on the referent that
> > will suffice to determine, and thus render redundant, for
> > all practical purposee, the other dimensions of meaning.
>
> Then again, maybe not.
The ambivalence about embracing versus resolving ambiguities
is actually due to a formal principle in classical cybernetics,
a brand of "fighting entropy with entropy" strategy that Ashby
called the "Law of Requisite Variety" (LORV). I would lorv
to go look it up and cite some pithy formulation here, but
I have just undergone a change of (physical) address, and
I have not got far enough into the heaps or the stacks of
old book boxes in my Personal Library of Babel that I can
find that particular volume yet. But I imagine that just
about everyone more or less knows this law under one name
or another, basically just a game-theoretic principle,
or could probably concoct it themselves from scratch.
More, later,
Jon
¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤