Re: SUO: Multi-Source Ontology (MSO) Draft Ballot Question
Bill,
The point I made about logic as a subset of every
natural language would have been obvious in the 19th
century, whem every college graduate had studied
logic in the traditional language-based notation.
I highly recommend the following textbook:
_The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar,
and Rhetoric_ by Sister Miriam Joseph.
It's available from Amazon.com for $11.87, and it
covers the traditional logic as expressed in English.
It's very well written and really fun to read.
The Amazon.com readers give it 4.5 stars out of 5.
If you want to see many examples in English, just
look at any textbook of mathematics or software
specification. You cannot talk about math, science,
engineering, or computer programming without using
the first-order subset of English very, very heavily.
It is also fundamental to legal writings, courts
of law, and contracts. The U.S. Constitution could
be translated directly to FOL. Modern civilization
would be impossible without using FOL as expressed
in ordinary language.
JS> The distinction of logic-based vs. language-based
> is meaningless because first-order logic is a
> subset of every natural language.
WB> Sounds as if you assume or believe that FOL is
> a "natural" and essential feature of natural languages,
> as if natural languages cannot exist without the
> property of containing FOL. Is this your understanding?
Certainly. All the words and syntax that you need to
express full first-order logic are available in just
a tiny, but very heavily used subset of English.
Words: every, some, and, or, not, if.
It's like prose. You've been speaking FOL all your
life without realizing it. Following is a list of
sentences that can be translated very easily into
FOL (assuming that the content words -- nouns, verbs,
adjectives, and prepositions -- have been associated
with some predicate or relation that defines the word
sense as used in the current discourse):
Every prime number less than 3 is even.
Some person is between a rock and a hard place.
Every person has some person as mother.
If a number is even,
then the number is not odd.
Every cat that is on a mat is happy.
And questions, such as the following, can be
translated to FOL expressions that specifies
a result to be determined:
What even number is smaller than 3?
John