- From: William Loughborough <love26@gorge.net>
- Date: Fri, 11 May 2001 05:29:57 -0700
- To: David Allsopp <dallsopp@signal.dera.gov.uk>, Danny Ayers <danny@panlanka.net>
- Cc: www-rdf-interest@w3.org
I promised my mother on her deathbed that I would stay out of philosophical
arguments about semiotics/semantics/language/meaning and other ivory tower
items on "The Pedantic Web" but I can't resist dipping a tentative toe in
this tub:
At 09:00 AM 5/11/01 +0100, David Allsopp wrote:
>No, not really[essentially about making usable inferences from limited
>data]. With a lot of other examples we might be able to sort
>some of the symbols into tentative categories and guess at some grammar
>rules (assuming that the foreign grammar is anything like ours!), but we
>still can never tell what the symbols actually mean. We may be talking
>about the same world, but it's a pretty big world, and the symbols could
>refer to _anything_.
In a Chomskian sense there is no "foreign grammar" - the very notion of
there even being a "grammar" demands that its being "anything like ours" is
not *assumption* but *fact* - what we generally agree on as "axiom". Also
"never" is such a long time that there is the possibility that if you wait
long enough even the Pico bus will come by and they'll put a tunnel under
the Channel. Not only "may" we be talking about the same world, it is the
only one we've got and symbols, although they *could* refer to *anything*,
in fact *don't* - they refer to something.
>One might have some success with very limited domains
In the sense herein *all* domains have limits, else they wouldn't be
domains, but universes.
This is all very fun, but what we're about is (or should be, IMO) dancing
the dance we sing of in these rather flighty songs.
Sorry, Mom - I just couldn't resist.
--
Love.
ACCESSIBILITY IS RIGHT - NOT PRIVILEGE
Received on Friday, 11 May 2001 08:28:28 UTC