Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural contextof SUO.

[pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>]

>Pat,
>
>At 10:52 PM 5/17/2001 -0500, pat hayes wrote:
>
>>>Pat,
>>>Davidsonian semantics is a good start
>>
>>But what has that got to do with KR? Are you suggesting that we 
>>change KIF to a language with Davidsonian semantics?
>
>Davidsonian semantics, at least as I understand it, is just an 
>approach to reifying event instances in order to render English 
>sentences more effectively in logic.  The notion of an event 
>instance, "surrounded" by roles that attach to the event is a KR 
>issue.

Ah, I misunderstood you. That idea is KR, true, but it was invented 
in KR independently of the linguistic input. It is indeed interesting 
that NL seems to utilise this kind of structure, let me say, and this 
fact is an interesting datum; but even here, the exact kind of 
'roles' that one gets from NL do not correspond in detail to the 
'roles' (this term is linguistic, so may warp the discusion if not 
scarequoted) that arise when one takes a more objectively ontological 
perspective. Many properties of events have no explicit linguistic 
markers, so are simply ignored by linguistic analysis: if there is no 
case role or prepositions for it, a linguist will not even consider 
it.

>After reading Davidson, or Parsons one may get a sense that it's 
>"obvious" but that to me is often the sign of good research, that 
>it's so correct that after absorbing the idea, one can't think of 
>why I shouldn't be so.
>
>>>, as well as the more fully developed and formal theories of event 
>>>interpretations found in Terence Parson's "Events in the Semantic 
>>>of English".
>>
>>OK, I will take a look, I do not know this in detail.  But if it 
>>really is a semantics of English, I doubt if it will be of great KR 
>>interest: there are so many things in the world that English has no 
>>semantics for.
>
>Well, even though English itself may not have explicit semantics for 
>certain notions, that's not to say than an analysis of the meaning 
>implicit in many English sentences can't have a beneficial impact on 
>KR research.

It could, I agree, but it can also have a very negative impact, which 
I think is much more common. Many linguistic analyses make 
distinctions based entirely on lexical or syntactic phenomena in NL, 
or even in a single natural language (usually English), and are based 
on an explicit methodology which insists that unless some distinction 
has, or is needed to account for, some such linguistic phenomenon, 
then it must not be allowed in the theory. Linguists, and 
linguistically oriented philosophical logicians, are often quite 
explicit about this, cf.
Hans Kamp:
"At present there isn't much that we can say with certainty about the 
way in which the human mind represents and processes information ... 
there is little hope that this situation will significantly improve 
in the foreseeable future... So theorizing about these matters...is 
something one had better stay away from. ... A theory of attitude 
reports ought to be independent of any specific assumptions about the 
organization of mental states and the mechanisms which transform 
them."

Or Piek Vossen on the distinction between 'first order' and 'second 
order' entities, for him a central distinction: (from old email:)

> >The discussion we had is whether wind and fire are 1st order or 2nd order
> >entities. Is wind a phenomenon and therefore second order or is it a
> >physical thing involved ina blowing event. What we would like to capture is
> >the normal standard interpretation and classification of phenomena such as
> >wind, fire.

Sounds like an ontological matter, but it turned out to bea lexical, 
not an ontological distinction, based on whether or not you could 
legitimately use the continuous present ("...ing"):(Email from Livia 
Polyani)

>I think the key distinction is between being able to use the 
>sentence "The wind
>blows" versus using the sentence "the wind is blowing". From a 
>linguistic point
>of view, they are very different animals.

The point being that for Piek (and Livia), this was not linguistic 
evidence of some underlying ontological distinction: it was the 
*definition* of the distinction itself. Which seems to my 
ontologist's mind to make the distinction ontologically useless. 
There might be (surely is) a related ontological distinction, but the 
linguistic methodology actively prevents one from approaching it 
properly.

Pat

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