SUO: Re: Critique Of Non-Functional Reason
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| A. Automated Reasoning (AR)
|
| The standard will be suitable for automated logical inference
| to support knowledge-based reasoning applications.
| B. Inter-Operability (IO)
|
| The standard will provide a basis for achieving Inter-Operability
| among various software and database applications.
[A]
For the sake of comparing alternative approaches to AR,
and by way of providing an array of vocabulary options,
I am required to adduce a few bits of reading material
from representative classics with bearing on the area.
To begin I append this unselfish quotation from Quine:
| Chapter 1. Statements
|
| Section 5. Statements About Statements
|
| To say that a city or a word has a given property, e.g. populousness or
| disyllabism, we attach the appropriate predicate to a name of the city
| or word in question (cf. Section 4). To say that a statement has
| a given property, e.g. the phonetic property of being a hexameter
| or the semantic property of truth or falsehood, we attach the
| appropriate predicate to a name of the statement in question --
| not to the statement itself. Thus, to attribute truth to:
|
| 1. Jones is ill
|
| we write:
|
| 2. "Jones is ill" is true,
|
| and to attribute falsehood we write:
|
| 3. "Jones is ill" is false.
|
| Equivalently, we may write:
|
| 4. (1) is true,
| 5. (1) is false;
|
| but never:
|
| 6. Jones is ill is true,
| 7. Jones is ill is false,
|
| on the analogy of:
|
| 8. ~ Jones is ill.
|
| (2)-(5) are about the statement (1), but (8) is not;
| it, like (1), is about Jones. "Is true" and "is false"
| attach to names of statements precisely because, unlike "~",
| they are predicates by means of which we speak 'about' statements.
| Whereas statement connectives ("~", "&", "v", "=>", "<=>") attach
| to statements to form statements, a predicate is an expression
| which attaches to names to form statements. Grammar alone is
| enough to condemn (6) and (7), since each occurrence of "is"
| should have a noun as subject. Confusion over this matter
| results in the view that the suffix "is true" is vacuous,
| and that the suffix "is false" is the English translation
| of the prefix "~"; the view, in other words, that (6) is
| equivalent to (1), and (7) to (8).
|
| Quine, 'Mathematical Logic', pages 27-28.
|
| Willard Van Orman Quine,
|'Mathematical Logic', Revised Edition,
| Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,
| 1940, 1951, 1981.
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