Re: Terms and statements (was: consensus and ownership)

On Friday, October 17, 2003, at 12:02  PM, Dan Connolly wrote:

> On Thu, 2003-10-16 at 09:52, Graham Klyne wrote:
>> At 08:47 16/10/03 -0400, Thomas B. Passin wrote:
>>> Graham Klyne wrote:
>>>> This idea of meaning being based in consensus also appears in the 
>>>> work by
>>>> Quine that I mentioned the other week [1].
>>>> A possible difference in position would be that you talk about the
>>>> meaning of a URI, where Quine's analysis suggest that it's not the
>>>> individual terms but complete statements that have meaning.  (I 
>>>> think
>>>> that's a point that Pat has been trying to press, too.)
>
> Yes, but an interesting thing about the Web is that many of the
> terms refer to documents, i.e. collections of statements.

This is true of the English I speak and understand as well :) But then, 
I covet a large library.

(It's not clear that a document is a collection of statements, at 
least, I would have had an 'e.g.,' rather than an 'i.e.,'. I'd *guess* 
that many, if not most, documents on the web have plenty of 
non-assertional content.

(Uhm..this was less a critical point than just an observation.)

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.

Received on Friday, 17 October 2003 12:13:50 UTC