SUO: Re: Colorless Green Events Process Furiously
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Pierre Grenon wrote:
>
> I thought it would be a more sexy note that you'd send with such a title.
>
> I don't see your point. How could one think of resolving
> any ontological issues about events and processes based on
> the syntactical categories of these two English words?
Well, I personally don't think that one can.
But that makes most people regard confuse me
with a dyed-in-the-wool Chomskian, which is
rather skew to my actual line of thinking.
But there has been a rather long history
of proposals over the years that try to
say that part of what makes a sentence
of a natural language grammatical is
any number of additional cognitive,
interpretive, lexical, pragmatic,
relational, semantic, ..., the
list goes on, categories of
features that are borne on
the syntactic sleeves of
the strings. And what
Erik and Patrick are
proposing in their
different ways is
very close to
this.
So the question is, can you extract, by purely deductive and
inductive means, a culture's ontology, simply from looking at
a corpus of grammatically graded texts? The question is not
whether such a corpus bears information about the ontology,
information that could be pumped out by priming the pump
with a lucky enough abductive hypothesis, in the usual
way of doing inquiry, because it would be hopeless if
that were true. But the risk of one's initial guess
is ever-present in everything that devolves from it.
Jon Awbrey
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> >
> > The quite unmarked example in the subject line tells us
> > just how much information about the intended denotations
> > of the words "event" and "process" can be extracted from
> > a natural language grammar. In the case of "event", it
> > tells us that it is a noun, perhaps a singular noun, and
> > no more, not even whether it is "abstract" or "physical",
> > whatever those mean. In the case of "process", it cannot
> > even tell us that much, since it could be a noun or a verb.
> >
> > Jon Awbrey
> >
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