[Inquiry] Re: Effective Logical Formalism -- Literature Notes

[Jon Awbrey]

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ELF.  Literature Note 3

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GH = Guha & Hayes
JA = Jon Awbrey
MA = Murray Altheim

GH: | 1.  Model-theoretic Semantics
    |
    | A model-theoretic semantics for a language assumes that the language refers
    | to a 'world', and describes the minimal conditions that a world must satisfy
    | in order to assign an appropriate meaning for every expression in the language.
    | A particular world is called an interpretation, so that model theory might be
    | better called 'interpretation theory'.  The idea is to provide a mathematical
    | account of the properties that any such interpretation must have, making as
    | few assumptions as possible about its actual nature or intrinsic structure.
    | Model theory tries to be metaphysically and ontologically neutral.  It is
    | typically couched in the language of set theory simply because that is the
    | normal language of mathematics -- for example, this semantics assumes that
    | names denote things in a set IR called the 'universe' -- but the use of
    | set-theoretic language here is not supposed to imply that the things in
    | the universe are set-theoretic in nature.
    |
    | R.V. Guha and Patrick Hayes,
    |"LBase:  Semantics for Languages of the Semantic Web",
    | W3C Working Group Note, 10 Oct 2003.
    |
    | http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-lbase-20031010/

JA: I thought that it was a bang-up start to remind the reader that we are
    interested in using language to describe a world.  Even if that hardly
    resolves all the problems as to what indeed, and what in turn, we mean
    by "world", it does supply us at the outset with the several senses of
    context, direction, and focus that we can use to orient our discussion.

JA: That has provisionally decided me to view this text as a potential
    contribution to our efforts to describe our world, in those senses.

JA: Let me now pick over the initiatory paragraph and make a note
    of the bones of its anatomy that I know from prior experience
    are likely to be the sources of some contention in the upshot.

JA: The word "interpretation", like its cohorts in this Garden --
    among whose legion is enumerated "meaning" and "semantics" --
    is known to be spoken with a forked tongue, that is to say,
    with many meanings, not to be intentionally recursive, but
    guilelessly and hopelessly, inviting interpretation itself.

MA: This is where, despite my readings in various forms of logic, I'm
    able to figure out where and when the rubber is to meet the road.

I am rechnening, despite your writing of what I read, that you meant "not"
able to figure out whence and since when the pragmatic tractability comes?

MA: For example, logical systems by their nature live in the abstract,
    and what we're trying to do is describe physical reality, which I
    think requires a "hook" between abstract and physical. The "hook"
    is always where we get hung, whether we're talking logic or about
    some other domain, like religion, political science, etc. I think
    Fritzof Capra wrote a whole book about the difficulties we arrive
    at upon trying to mix "worlds".

You know, I reckon, that's there's a vast contemporarty literature on the
so-called "grounding of symbols problem" (GOSP), almost none of which can
be called grounded in any reading of that "practical nobody", C.S. Peirce.
So let's let that pass, and return to our intermediary of prior resources.

The "pragmatic theory of signs" (PTOS) is not your Dalton's theory of signs,
that requires literal "hooks" to hook up objects, signs, and interpretants.
I do remember with some fondness at least one old book by Fritzhof Capra,
and if you have in mind, now, the one I mean, it would be good to recall
just how much our ground-level physics has changed since Dalton's time,
and then ask yourself, "Why is our logic still so backwardly atomic?"

As you know, I have to reed texts in brief stiches, so later, Dude.

Jon Awbrey

Incidental Musements:

http://www.kwantlen.bc.ca/~mikec/P2421_Notes/Ground/Ground.html
http://www.kwantlen.bc.ca/~mikec/P2421_Notes/Phasors/Phasors.ht

MA: So, the question for me seems always to boil down to where on the
    chin the hook is placed, and that hook seems to be "context" or
    "interpretation", "situation", or whatever we want to call the
    thing that gets us from abstract to concrete, from the rubber
    to the real road. I don't want to see SCL used as a rubber
    to keep us from having contact with the road. So in LBase,
    do we want our interpretation early or late in the process?
    Can we design a system that is purely abstract and obtains its
    usefulness only in a later usage/interpretation, or are we able
    to design a logical system that has interpretation built into its
    very core? My feeling on Peirce is that he was attempting to design
    a system that included interpretation as part of core of the overall
    model, that it wasn't an add-on, an option, an afterthought.

MA: I like the way you're going about this though. I think it's very
    important to seriously look at the assumptions in something like
    LBase, perhaps to the exclusion of the rest of it, until we feel
    like we either agree with or at least understand the ground that
    we're on. Then we move forward with the rest.

MA: Just so nobody freaks out, I'm not normally as orthographically
    obsessed as Jon.  It just came out that way.  :-)

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