Re: SUO: Multi-Source Ontology (MSO) Draft Ballot Question
Bill,
I certainly approve of raising questions, of which there
are a great many to be raised about the relationships
of language, logic, and thought.
WB> ... I just wanted to raise the question lest everyone
> on the group think that it's universally accepted that
> FOL is a natural, unquestioned, entailed subset of
> natural language.
Nothing should be "unquestioned", but before we can
question the relationships of FOL and natural language,
it is important to question what we mean by FOL and
by natural language.
If by FOL you mean predicate calculus and the rules
of inference that are taught in a typical course on
syymbolic logic, then I would agree that is rather
far removed from what people mean by ordinary English.
On the other hand, if by FOL, you mean a particular
range of expressive power and truth conditions on how
various sentences are related to one another, then
there is a certain kind of logic which is expressed
in every natural language, and which most people would
agree is just plain old "common sense".
Have you read the book by Sr. Miriam Joseph? If not,
I strongly suggest that you look at it seriously.
After doing so, I would challenge you to find anything
in that book that could be called "unnatural", outside
the range of ordinary English usage, or incompatible
with common sense.
Yet the kind of logic presented in that book and
the methods of reasoning are completely compatible
with what is usually called FOL.
John