SUO: Re: Core Meanings & Stand Up Ontology
Pat Hayes wrote:
> [John Sowa wrote:]
> >
> > 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).
>
> However, there is a new dimension which arises in the case of
> programming and other 'technical' languages, which is that if
> we accept this idea than we have to allow machines as semiotic
> players in their own right, and indeed players with a special
> claim to a unique role in the social games. I am happy to go
> this route, but we have to face up to the fact that it goes
> beyond what Wittgenstein or (I guess) Peirce would have had
> in mind.
>
> Pat
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Pat,
My favorite definition of "machine" --
one I more or less derive from Ashby --
is something like "law-abiding process".
And, yes, this does include the political sort,
the secret spring and catch of this definition
being that we need not know the laws it abides,
merely that we maintain a regulative hope that
the laws of its actual operation can be sprung
into the light of clarity, some day, some way.
And as for your guess about the contents of Peirce's mind,
my guess would be that your guess is just a little bit off.
Hunting for my favorite quote about this particular subject,
I came across this passage from an old project paper of mine:
> Intelligent Systems Project,
> Division 3, Version 4,
> Autumn 1992
>
> 3. Instrumental Focus
>
> 3.1 Propositional Calculus
>
> A symbolic calculus is needed to assist our reasoning and computation in the
> realm of propositions. With an eye toward efficiency of computing and ease
> of human use, while preserving both functional and declarative properties
> of propositions, I have implemented an interpreter and assorted utilities
> for one such calculus. The original form of this particular calculus goes
> back to the logician C.S. Peirce, who is my personal favorite candidate for
> the grand-uncle of AI. Among other things, Peirce discovered the logical
> importance of Nand/Nnor operators (CP 4.12 ff, 4.264 f), (NE 4, ch. 5),
> inspired early ideas about logic machines (Peirce, 1883), is credited
> with "the first known effort to apply Boolean algebra to the design
> of switching circuits" (M. Gardner, p. 116n), and even speculated
> on the nature of abstract interpreters and other "Quasi-Minds"
> (Peirce, CP 4.536, 4.550 ff).
>
> | Thought is not necessarily connected with a brain.
> | It appears in the work of bees, of crystals, and
> | throughout the purely physical world; and one
> | can no more deny that it is really there, than
> | that the colors, the shapes, etc., of objects
> | are really there. (CP 4.551).
>
> One could hardly invent a better anthem for the work being done today in the
> AI/systems hybrid areas of cellular automata (Burks, 1970), (Ulam, ch. 12),
> (Nicolis & Prigogine, 1989), emergent computation (Forrest, 1991), and the
> "society of mind" theories (Minsky, 1986). I hope it will emerge that these
> workers achieve the same grade of well-honed insight regarding the mind's
> apical functions that Peirce was able to inspire, having once acquired
> a taste for it in the higher combines of logic's hive.
>
> More than any logician, before or since, Peirce appreciated the importance
> of the fact that the physical properties of signs, from elementary signals to
> symbolic representations of the most general kind, involve practical constraints
> on their processing transformations. These pragmatic factors have a real bearing
> on the actualities of logic and interpretation, as executed in the performance of
> physically implemented minds, mental agencies, or quasi-interpreters.
>
> Logical representation and interpretation, as physical and recursive processes,
> have boundary conditions that are especially significant. Consequently, Peirce
> could think it worth the trouble to ask: What would have to be the logical meaning
> of the blank sheet of paper on which logical expressions are intended to be written?
> His speculations on such questions show his sensitivity to the issue of the how the
> medium constrains and thus informs the message.
>
> It can be imagined how mindless such inquiries must have seemed to Peirce's
> contemporaries, and it is possible to read the remarks of later commentators
> who should have known better. But these are exactly the kinds of practical
> questions that have to be addressed in implementing formal languages with
> recursive syntax and in defining semantic valuations on such domains in
> the form of computational interpreters.
>
> The boundary is the region in computational space where initial, adaptive,
> and interactive parameters are determined. It can extend from initial
> conditions and fixed code to the current interface and forward in time.
> The shape of this boundary and the values attached to it are critical
> questions for the definition of a semantic function. A reasonably
> useful semantic function has to be almost wholly determined by the
> values it takes within a finite neighborhood of its boundary.
>
> But natural objects, and there are beginning to be hints that
> natural languages must be counted among them, often take the
> form of fractals (Cherry, 1966), (Mandelbrot, 1977, 1983),
> (Rietman, 1989), shapes, regions, and topographies that are
> almost all boundary. This area of inquiry is still in flux.
>
> In the realm of natural language processing, where AI makes contact
> with the concerns of linguistics, one school of thought responds to
> these questions under the rubric of "principles and parameters" and
> carries on a vigorous dialogue about the conceivable distributions
> of labor between the "core" and the "periphery" of a typical natural
> language and the impact of this question on the associated learning
> or developmental processes fro the language (Chomsky, 1965, 1981, 1986).
>
> In his emphasis on the physicality of signs and the fact that
> their processes would have to be subsumed under natural laws,
> Peirce anticipated by many years another cornerstone of AI,
> the "physical symbol system hypothesis" of Newell and Simon.
>
> All of these issues that occupied Peirce would be encountered again,
> much later on in the 20th century, when computer scientists, linguists,
> communication engineers, media theorists, and others would be forced to
> deal with them in their daily practice and would perforce discover many
> workable answers. These are the topics that have come to be recognized
> as the reality of information and uncertainty, the physicality of symbol
> systems, the independent dimension of syntax, the complexity of semantics
> and evaluation, the pragmatic metes and bounds of interactive communication
> and interpretive control. All in all, as acutely discovered in AI systems
> engineering, these factors sum up to the general resistance of matter to
> being impressed with our minds.
I believe that John Sowa has also cited
Peirce's remark about "Bees and Crystals"
on several occasions, here and elsewhere.
Many Regards,
Jon Awbrey
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