Due to Chomsky's misleadership in the field, Pat is right that linguistic theories tend to start from "bottom" up examining syntax and grammar without any real theory of "meaning" upon which to base it. They then proceed to "semantics" and "pragmatics" to account for word meaning, sentence meaning, and context-based meaning. But linguists, IMHO, haven't done a great subject in explaining what "meaning" is and how we can communicate meaning - they just take for granted that it's there. I have found philosophy of knowledge (e.g., John Searle) and sociology of knowledge (e.g., social construction theory) far more illuminating into the problems we are facing concerning "meaning". The social theories I think are most practical and realistic: when it comes down it, an element of our ontology "means" what we negotiate and use it to mean. (In fact, I believe that we can't do anything OTHER than this.) Wrt the SUO, this means identifying ourselves as an ontology-usage community (or "information community", to use the GIS researchers term), negotiate and accept an SUO (and meaning of it's elements) and *create*a*plan* for how it will *evolve*in*response to usage. Bill Burkett > -----Original Message----- > From: pat hayes [mailto:phayes@ai.uwf.edu] > Sent: Friday, May 18, 2001 10:26 AM > To: John F. Sowa > Cc: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org > Subject: Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural > contextof SUO. > > > > >Pat, > > > >I think you have it backwards: > > > > > 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. > > > >English can successfully communicate a vastly wider range of topics > >than any artificial language (formal or otherwise) every invented. > > > >It may well be true that there are topics that English (and other > >natural languages) can routinely represent that have not yet been > >mapped into a formal language with a model-theoretic semantics. > >But that is not a point against English, but a point against the > >weaknesses of current formalizations. It shows that there are > >legitimate topics of interest that have not yet been formalized. > > > >If KIF were better than English, we would all be using KIF for > >these email exchanges. > > You miss the point. Of course things can be said in English. But > linguistics is concerned with the *structure* of English (or NL > generally), and many things that can be said IN English need a lot of > saying, and are not directly revealed in syntactic structure. And > those tend to be ignored, or worse, warped, by a linguistic approach > to understanding meaning. > > Pat > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > IHMC (850)434 8903 home > 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office > Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax > phayes@ai.uwf.edu > http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes > Subject: Re: SUO: Universal Time, other universals, and cultural contex tof SUO. Date: Mon, 21 May 2001 20:42:12 -0400 From: Jon Awbrey To: William Burkett CC: standard-upper-ontology@ieee.org References: 1 ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤ > William Burkett wrote: > > Due to Chomsky's misleadership in the field, ... Bizarre! Of course I have heard it all before, but I always get this peculiar sensation of irony when I see somebody write this sort of stuff in this particular medium, since I know that the work of those dastardly misleaders Chomsky & Schutzenberger is built into just about every parser and every program that manipulates these syn-tactless aspersions of them. | N. Chomsky and M.P. Schutzenberger, |"The Algebraic Theory of Context-Free Languages", |'Computer Programming and Formal Systems', | North-Holland Publishing Company, 1963. Chomsky did what every sensible thinker does, when presented with some overwhelmingly complex material or phenomenon that he or she really wants to understand, in all of its gory and not so automatically a push over for axioms in the manner of those who would just blow smoke all around it, and that's to find a reasonable way to simplify the problem into something that a mere mortal can handle at first blush. These species of specious remarks are even more sublimely ridiculous given in a forum where most people have yet to escape those searly bounds of strait-jacketed assumptions that were wound around our brains by none other than Aristotle, again, swaddling us in approximations that were sensible in his time -- but now!? > Pat is right that linguistic theories tend to start from "bottom" up > examining syntax and grammar without any real theory of "meaning" upon > which to base it. They then proceed to "semantics" and "pragmatics" to > account for word meaning, sentence meaning, and context-based meaning. > But linguists, IMHO, haven't done a great subject in explaining what > "meaning" is and how we can communicate meaning -- they just take > for granted that it's there. When we get as far as specifying a non-trivial syntax, then maybe we can begin to judge. > I have found philosophy of knowledge (e.g., John Searle) and > sociology of knowledge (e.g., social construction theory) far > more illuminating into the problems we are facing concerning > "meaning". The social theories I think are most practical > and realistic: when it comes down it, an element of our > ontology "means" what we negotiate and use it to mean. > (In fact, I believe that we can't do anything OTHER > than this.) Wrt the SUO, this means identifying > ourselves as an ontology-usage community (or > "information community", to use the GIS > researchers term), negotiate and accept > an SUO (and meaning of it's elements) > and *create*a*plan* for how it will > *evolve*in*response to usage. These are interseting topic areas, of course, but they remain at present in a state of pre-scientific speculation, in which pretty much everybody can pick from the smorgasbord of things that they would most like to believe. The fact that most of our 20th Century Illiterati did not bother to check out what had gone before tells us that we are still in the realm of cyclic and mythical time, the intellectual historical Id. Just my hazy impression, Jon Awbrey ¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤