ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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| Document History
|
| Subject: Inquiry Driven Systems: An Inquiry Into Inquiry
| Contact: Jon Awbrey <jawbrey@oakland.edu>
| Version: Draft 8.70
| Created: 23 Jun 1996
| Revised: 06 Jan 2002
| Advisor: M.A. Zohdy
| Setting: Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA
| Excerpt: Section 1.3.4 (Discussion of Formalization: Concrete Examples)
| Excerpt: Subsection 1.3.4.8 (The Conflict of Interpretations)
|
| http://members.door.net/arisbe/menu/library/aboutcsp/awbrey/inquiry.htm
1.3.4.8 The Conflict of Interpretations
One discrepancy that needs to be documented can be observed in
the conflict of interpretations between A and B, as reflected
in the lack of congruity between their semiotic partitions of
their shared syntactic domain. This is a problematic but all
in all a realistic feature of the present example. That is,
it exemplifies a type of problem with the interpretation of
pronouns, more generally, indexical signs or bound variables,
that actually arises in practice when attempting to formalize
the semantics of natural, logical, and programming languages.
On this account, the deficiency resides in the present analysis,
and the burden remains to clarify exactly what is going on here.
Notice, however, that I have deliberately avoided trying to deal with
these brands of indexical tokens in all of the more usual ways, namely,
by seeking to eliminate all of the incipient semantic ambiguities from
the canonical formalization of the working subject matter. Instead, I
have sought to preserve this aspect of interpretive discrepancy as one
of the essential phenomena and one of the inescapable facts in the realm
of pragmatic semantics, tantamount to the irreducible nature of perspective
diversity. I believe that the desired competence in this faculty of language
will come, not from any strategy of substitution that constantly replenishes
bound variables with their objective referents on every fixed occasion, but
from a pattern of recognition that keeps the indexical signs persistently
attached to their interpreters of reference.
Jon Awbrey
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