RE: SUO: Core Meanings and the SUO
Douglas,
. Why should what you are saying necessarily be so?
. To me you are addressing the matter that, often, people
don't precisely define their utterances, with the result that the
information interpreted doesn't always match that uttered. But, that doesn't
mean that everyone is as ambiguous as everyone else, nor that ambiguity is
unavoidable if sufficient care is expended to be precise.
. Leaving out all sorts of issues of freedom for people to
express themselves as they wish, including as ambiguously as they like, why
will not the precision of computer languages serve to achieve unambiguity?
Allowing for the severely restricted vocabulary, if I communicate to you in
a computer language in which you are literate, surely you will understand
precisely what I say?
. If we start from this sort of basis, and I don't care
whether its using a "CE" or "KIF", then why won't we achieve unambiguous
communication?
. I admit, that when it comes to expressing complex and/or
sophisticated concepts, then the communication will require:
* prefacing with some assumed structure (eg. possibly the concept that
anger arises out of fear); and
* a great deal of elaboration to ensure every aspect is defined.
Graham Horn
Australian Institute of Health and Welfare
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Phone: 02.6244.1094
Fax: 02.6244.1199
Email: Graham.Horn@aihw.gov.au <mailto:graham.horn@aihw.gov.au>
-----Original Message-----
From: Douglas McDavid [mailto:mcdavid@us.ibm.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2000 1:18 PM
To: sowa@bestweb.net
Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Subject: Re: SUO: Core Meanings and the SUO
John --
Thanks for the bibliographic correction in your earlier note: Elizabeth -->
Eleanor ... ;-)
But, on the main point, I think you are still drawing a misleading
parallelism. In your note below, it seems to me that you are equating the
language of computer science (a technical lexicon that is comparable to the
lexicons of law, business, cooking, etc.) with programming languages. The
language of computer science is used by human beings to communicate with
each other. A programming language is used by humans to instruct machines.
In my mind, at least, this is a significant ontological distinction. One of
the implications of this distinction is that polysemy is much less
acceptable in any programming language than it is in any human-to-human
language.
Doug
-----Original Message-----
"John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>@bestweb.net on 12/11/2000 02:59:03 PM
Please respond to sowa@bestweb.net
Sent by: sowa@bestweb.net
To: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>, "John F. Sowa" <sowa@bestweb.net>,
Douglas McDavid/Boulder/IBM@IBMUS, standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
cc:
Subject: Re: SUO: Core Meanings and the SUO
Jon,
I think that is a good way to put it:
>I do not know if this helps with your particular issue here,
>but one of the ways that I tend to think of it from within
>a pragmatic sign-theory framework is to index every sign
>to the "community of interpretation" that employs it in
>the way that it does. As limiting and special cases,
>of course, a "community" can be a single person or
>even a machine.
The point I was trying to make in my note is that there is
no major difference between the way that multiple word senses
arise in natural languages and the way they arise in various
technical/scientific/artificial/programming languages.
Wittgenstein used the term "language game" for the way some
community uses a word in some pattern of behavior. The kinds
of language games that occur in computer science are of the
same nature as the games that are played in engineering,
science, business, cooking, law, economics, etc.
I used the word "culture" to describe the origin of the
multiple word senses. But of course, every culture arises
from the traditional practices in some community (but I agree
with Wittgenstein that a community should at least have two
members -- a family is a typical minimal example).
In fact, I would define "culture" as the hypostatic abstraction
of a community's semiotic games (including language games
as a special case).
John Sowa