ONT Failed Attempts At Communication
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Chris, Mike,
I am doing a post mortem analysis on some of my communication failures
over the past year in the SUO Forum, and it happens that the following
note from Mike to Chris lies at the epicenter of a critcial fault zone
in several of my misapprehensions. This note got quoted many times by
many people in a way that makes it appear like the entire comment was
made by Chris, while a closer inspection of the initial remark seems
to show that the remark below the hash mark "---" was made by Mike.
It would help me a lot if you could verify or correct this reading.
Thanks In Prospect,
Jon Awbrey
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Subj: Re: Starter KB V2 Question #8
Date: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 12:37:53 -0700 (PDT)
From: mfu@redwood.rt.cs.boeing.com (Michael Uschold)
To: cmenzel@philebus.tamu.edu, jawbrey@oakland.edu
CC: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org
Chris Menzel says:
Note this is, again, not ambiguity -- for a term to be ambiguous is for
it to have more than one meaning. To be indefinite is to have a single
meaning which can be extended in more than one way.
---
This is a subtle, technical distinction. If I look at a term and its axioms and
I can think of two ways to extend it and I'm not sure which one the axiom-writer
meant, or indeed whether he meant what he said (i.e. it entails both cncpts) then
from an informal point of view -- me looking at and trying to understand this term,
I think of it as being ambiguous. I am not sure what the author meant.
I'm not suggesting your comments are incorrect, -- only that there is a common sense
way of thinking about this which makes them seem incorrect.
Perhaps it's because the word 'ambiguous' is self-describing?
Mike
http://suo.ieee.org/email/msg01212.html
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