Re: [KIF] Re: SUO: tuples
> Two important considerations were brought to bear on the elimination of
> the distinction in the group. First, in the traditional language of
> FOL, with its inviolable division between predicates and terms, one
> cannot treat the semantic values of predicates as first-class citizens.
> This is a syntactic limitation that is often violated in ontology and
> other contexts; one may well wish both to predicate a property of
> something and also say something about that very property. (SUMO, for
> instance, contains a number of such constructs, and I suspect Cyc does
> as well.) It is often thought that one has to move to a second-order
> logic, or to the metalevel, to do that, but in fact most contexts in
> which this "objectification" of properties and the like is desired do
> not require this huge bump in expressive power. In the abolition of the
> distinction between predicates and terms, CL explicitly gives users the
> ability to do this while remaining completely first-order (in the row
> variable free sublanguage of full CL).
Chris,
Could we put a collection of these practical examples (constructs from SUMO,
CYC, or elsewhere) on the CL website? This would serve practitioners as
justification for this approach and provide a target for theoreticians (like
myself)?
Robert E. Kent
rekent@ontologos.org