SUO: Re: Monosemy, Semantics, and Natural Language
Jean-Luc and Rich,
I agree that Jean-Luc's pessimism is well founded,
but I think that his quotation from Greg Chaitin
indicates how formal systems (such as math, logic,
CLCE, or anything else) can help:
GC> "In a way, math isn't the art of answering
> mathematical questions, it is the art of asking
> the right questions" -- Gregory Chaitin
That is my goal for CLCE. It doesn't solve any
of the real problems of semantics, polysemy, or
anything else that was discussed in the Seybold
report. But like any mathematical system, it can
help us ask the right questions about semantics.
That is one of my main reasons for proposing CLCE.
It addresses the confusions about semantics and
natural language by showing that you can have a
formal language whose surface syntax looks like NL.
It emphasizes the point that all the serious issues
lie in the semantics, not in the syntax.
I also wanted to clarify the following point that
Rich raises:
RC> Disambiguate later: The main advantage here is
> of purity; the original ontology or CLCE is very
> precisely defined. It's just not very easy to use,
> so the debates among early adopters (and fewer
> of them) are precise and surgical.
CLCE has no more (or less) built-in ontology than
first-order logic. It is merely syntactic sugar
for FOL. That is all it is. You can say as much
or as little in CLCE as you can say in FOL, and
you say it in essentially the same way. The only
difference between CLCE and predicate calculus
is something abolutely trivial -- syntax.
Once we recognize that syntax is not the problem,
we can begin to address the real problems of
semantics, which are far more fundmental and far
more recalcitrant than Frege, Russell, Carnap,
or the semantic webbers realize.
And by the way, I am not as pessimistic as Jean-Luc.
I agree with Jean-Luc that the currently popular
proposals won't solve anything, but I believe that
it is possible to do something useful -- but not what
the Seybold report (or the semantic webbers) propose.
John Sowa