Re: UCR

> On 10. Jun 2024, at 22:53, Niklas Lindström <lindstream@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
> To aid in this assessment, I made a short presentation (6 slides) at
> [1], focusing on what I think is the most pertinent question at hand:
> "Tokens and/or Reifiers?"
> 
> Best regards,
> Niklas
> 
> [1]: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/e/2PACX-1vQd9lU1j4TPxluCe-cB0t7_BUpy8zAfeY_5hDlbwIyOB8wsiRqkRtSFP4AeflV5UsE4EqT-Y3_Jjx9q/pub

Not a fan of slide decks since they are hard to comment on.


On slide "Use Case Categories" you broadly distinguish two categories:
1. Token provenance - to which timestamps, source, and level of trust can be assigned
2. Statement qualification - about detailed circumstances such as events or situations

I agree in principle/roughly, but I think we can do better:

A) about the statement as a whole, i.e an entitiy in its own right
B) about the kind of relation described by the statement

A is of course very well suited to describe provenance, but also versioning, plausibility, propositional attitude, etc. However, the crucial aspect is that it talks about the statement as a whole, as an object in its own right. Annotating that object doesn’t change the assertion it represents, it only comments on it.

B on the other hand qualifies the relation. It may add that a "likes" relation is indeed strongly felt, that a "buys" relation was performed via eletronic payment, etc. It might even go further and comment on properties of the subject and object at the time the relation existed, maybe that Paul was in a hurry when he bought the ticket, but such detail seems out of scope to this WG. However, I don’t find the notion of "events or situations" helpful to clarify the distinction between 1/A and 2/B.


What bugs me right now is that
- reification is well suited to represent 1/A
- instantiation via singleton properties is better suited to represent 2/B.
However, who wants to complicate things even further than they are already?!

But, w.r.t. to the discussion about what reification actually is, if occurrences are the right concept/term, etc, I think it’s important that we agree on the categorization A/B. I hope you find it clearer than 1/2, but maybe you can come up with an even better abstraction.


Your slide "Two Kinds of 'Occurrences'" doesn’t make much sense to me, especially how you characterize a token. I think, plato.stanford.edu is more helpful to define the notion of a token. More generally you mix use cases with structural properties and add orthogonal questions like opacity to the mix. I think that needs more differentiation, and separation of concerns.

Enrico mentioned in the last SemTF meeting that there are different kinds of referential opacity:
- totally opaque, like a literal referring only to itself
- co-referentially opaque, refering to a real world entity but suppressing co-denotation
- maybe various levels of co-referential opacity depending on syntactic details (e.g. if the two intergers 42 and 042 are different or not)
We have to discuss if we need those, all of them, or which ones…
We can derive them all from the abstract unasserted triple term via specific (and to be defined) properties, we can define different syntaxes to represent them (some combinatiosn of <> and "" might do the trick), etc, but who would implement all that, and who would even bother to understand? So do we need to decide? 

That is orthogonal to the asserted-unasserted axis.
It is also orthogonal to the 1/A-2/B categorization above.

Again, I don’t find that "situations, events or circumstances" categorization useful. There are many more things on earth, like theories, relationships, broadly agreed upon facts, the periodic system, Paul buying a ticket, etc. We will neither be able to categorize them all nor do we need to: on the abstract level of statements about statements they all behave the same. The rest is vocabulary, if one is so inclined, and not our topic.

Best,
Thomas

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2024 21:33:30 UTC