Re: SUO: What the marketplace needs from us.
John,
The "primitives" vs "space cadets" issue is an interesting one. Others
may know this by the terms "neats" and "scruffies". Those distinctions
tend to be one of perspective in both place and time. Compared to the
expert system crowd SUMO is decidedly neat. The semantic web crowd is
pretty scruffy in its appeal to the masses with a very simple frame-based
system, but it is rapidly becoming neat with a standard that employs model
theory, and an evolution to the more expressive language of OWL. I think
most folks would call SUMO neat in its adherence to a formal semantics
without appeal to any procedural code, and its use of FOL. A case could be
made that being neat is bad, but that's another argument.
Adam
At 06:46 PM 5/2/2003 -0400, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Bill,
>
>I worked at IBM for 30 years, and I am painfully
>aware of that problem:
>
>>Although I am being sarcastic, my statements
>>above reflect real attitudes of many computer
>>professionals. You might ask why would a computer
>>professional take such an attitude.
>
>And I know perfectly well why they take that
>attitude: they're ignorant. But it's not their
>fault because the people they hoped would enlighten
>them were just as ignorant. And you can trace the
>chain of ignorance back to the person who has done
>more to contribute to the downfall of logic in
>the 20th century than anyone else: Bertrand Russell.
>
>Bertie was certainly brilliant, but he was very
>one-sided, and his brilliance gave other people
>the illusion that he knew what he was talking about.
>That is why anything he ignored or derided was
>ignored and derided by a much larger group.
>
>Other people who were also brilliant, but one-sided
>must share some of the blame. Among them, I include
>Ernst Mach, Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, and Willard
>Van Orman Quine. In his youth, Wittgenstein was lured
>by Russell into the same trap, but he learned his lesson
>and spent the remainder of his life doing penance
>for his earlier sins. But by the middle of the 20th
>century, philosophy was divided into two warring camps:
>one that promulgated a very one-sided view of logic,
>and another that denounced logic or ignored it altogether.
>
>When computers came around, the people who used them
>were divided in two camps -- the primitives and the
>space cadets. The primitives used "seat-of-the-pants"
>coding to get results, and the space cadets were misled
>by the Russell-Carnap-Quine crowd to use the most esoteric
>imaginable theories and ignore anything practical.
>
>(And by the way, SUMO still suffers from a tinge of the
>primitive disease, and IFF suffers from a lot of the
>space cadet disease. That's one reason why I want them
>to work together: I'm hoping they might be able to
>cure one another.)
>
>>It is hard to make a logical argument to individuals
>>that don't understand logic well enough to follow the
>>argument. Give up on historical precedent, most people
>>can't appreciate the lessons that can be taken from history.
>>Somehow that requires a logical leap that if X happened
>>in the past under specific circumstances then X will
>>happen now under the same circumstances. Go figure.
>
>The strategy that I have adopted is twofold:
>
>1. For those people who know enough to realize that there's
> an awful lot they don't know, I'm recommending some
> suggested readings.
>
>2. For the great majority who consider money to be the only
> measure of success, I am hoping that the VivoMind company
> will produce logic-based software that will be sufficiently
> successful to demonstrate that logic does have value.
>
>I don't know whether this strategy will work, but I'll try.
>Who knows?
>
>John
>
>