Re: SUO: 21 May 2002 -- Unanswered Questions About SUMO Set Theory
On Thu, May 23, 2002 at 07:33:06AM -0700, Erik Larson wrote:
>
> First of all, Hi Pierluigi. How are you? I miss those cog sci
> discussions with you, Todd, and the rest of the crew (: Okay, you’re
> a good philosopher, so here’s a philosopher’s argument, contra your
> position, Adam’s, etc about the putative failures of the logicist
> camp (hope that term will work for you). Allow me a brief detour here
> so that I might make my case a bit more clearly later. Call a
> ‘Type-A’ construct Bill’s axiom:
>
> (=> (and (parentOf ?x ?y)
>
> (age ?x ?x-age)
>
> (age ?y ?y-age))
>
> (> ?y-age ?x-age))
>
> Call a ‘Type-B’ construct any procedure coded in a standard
> programming language (I’m abstracting away from details about code
> here—OOP principles or not, language variations, interpreted versus
> compiled expressions.) Since it would be silly to paste in some huge
> chunk of source code, here’s a ridiculously simple example that will
> do just fine for our purposes:
>
> While (i < 100) {
>
> Cout << "Hello SUO!\n";
>
> ++i;
>
> }
Hi Erik, good to hear from you, I miss those days too.
In this regard, I think we're talking at cross purposes. I wasn't
defending "declarative approaches" (btw, you'll see that your quotes are
reinterpreted by your yahoo mail reader as KIf variables :) over
"procedural" approaches in general. This is much too broad an issue. I
wouldn't know where to start, and I don't think it would be especially
interesting to anyone to hear such a screed coming from me. So I don't
really disagree with what you say, nor was I disagreeing in my previous
posts.
I thought Bill's example was not intended as a comparison between
declarative and non-declarative approaches, but rather of very distinct
uses of what we call generically "representations." I doubt that his
point was that "real people" really understand only C, and have no
patience for anything else. But Bill can explain for himself.
........
> And therein lies the rub: what is the connection between declarative
> power and inference? How exactly is superior expressivity supposed to
> solve practical inference problems for the RP crowd? The Type-A crowd
> acts as if by the fact of declaration alone, we all ought to be excited
> about the inferential possibilities. But no one has bothered to show
> exactly how this is so. Maybe it’s because they can’t. And this is
> where the history of failures becomes relevant: it’s not for lack of
> trying, is it? (Is it really just for lack of trying?). Prima facie, If
> I told you that the way to get more Y (inference) is to throw all your
> time at X (FOL declaration), but gave no recipe for how X relates to Y
> and couldn’t demonstrate this recipe over time, wouldn’t you be
> sceptical? (Well, maybe I forget myself).
About Bill's example, a point I tried to make was precisely that the
"value" of that rule need not lie only, or even primarily, in its
"inferential possibilities." Generally I try to keep inference and
ontology issues separate.
Best,
Pierluigi