Re: ONT Re: Zeroth Order Theories (ZOT's)
On Sat, Jan 26, 2002 at 09:24:06AM -0500, Jon Awbrey wrote:
> CM: Well, ignoring the inference from "S thinks baroque music is good"
> to "S thinks anything baroque is good", as in music so in logic.
> Detail and ornamentation are good when they have a purpose.
> My objection to your stuff, as clever and even as elegant
> as it might be, is that, as far as I can see, it just has
> no purpose. It either provides nothing that isn't already
> available in familiar (and generally far more straightforward)
> forms, or else it does things that appear to be utterly pointless.
>
> CM: What are the data structures depicted by your ASCII art *for*?
>
> They are for representing the same things that propositional
> expressions in every other adequate syntax represent, only with a
> better articulation of the invariant structures in these objects
> themselves and thus with what most folks who consider the matter would
> consider a better conceptual grasp of these objects, and,
> incidentally, but not entirely coincidentally, with a better address
> of their computational complexity and thus with a better
> mean-real-time computational performance, other things being equal.
Sounds good, but I really have no idea what you mean by the invariant
structures of propositional expressions that would make this claim true.
Perhaps you could tell us. The only invariant structures I can think of
(e.g., some representation of indicative statements, some representation
of boolean operators, operator scope, etc) would, as far as I can see,
be pretty much as fully articulated in one representation as another.
Though "degree of articulation" itself is an awfully vague and
subjective notion to carry much scientific weight.
But let me put my cards on the table. The reason I have been
challenging your views rather stridently is because of your earlier
portentous rumblings -- wholly devoid of argumentation -- about the
devastating consequences of using KIF and other standard logic-based KR
languages for ontology. All that you have provided us with is a
repackaging of first-order logic, basic set theory, and a bit of
recursion theory -- in a word (or two) nothing new, save some novel and
perhaps heuristically or pedagogically useful new representations --
which, in and of themselves, I encourage and applaud. But your dire
warnings against the use of KIF and its ilk for ontology are utterly
without foundation. Frankly, you should retract them.
Chris Menzel