- From: pat hayes <phayes@ihmc.us>
- Date: Thu, 9 Oct 2003 18:53:15 -0500
- To: Sandro Hawke <sandro@w3.org>, Bijan Parsia <bparsia@isr.umd.edu>
- Cc: public-sw-meaning@w3.org
> > On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 09:50 AM, pat hayes wrote: >> [snip] >> > Suggestion: lets decide to NEVER make rules that require consistency. >> >> Hear hear. > >I was oversimplifying to focus on the difference between being >consistent with someone else's content and asserting that person's >content. > >In fact, I would recommend never saying something you *know* is >inconsistent, and making a reasonable effort (which depends on your >situation) to find out if it is. I know, of course, that proving >consistency is sometimes impossible and often impractical. Well, OK, but I can think of times when it might make sense even to do that. Suggestion: rephrase this in terms of, when an inference is made, who is responsible for the conclusion? That is, if you do accept it (and act on it) whose affirmation are you relying on? Focussing on that question, a few guidelines: 1. If you derive a conclusion from a contradiction, then nobody is responsible for it but you: a derivation from a contradiction adds no weight to the conclusion at all, so if you publish it then that is just like publishing a brand-new assertion; you, the publisher, can't appeal to any other authority. 2. Otherwise, if you derive a conclusion from something published by a source S using valid inference methods, then you can attribute the conclusion to S. 3. If you derive a conclusion from information published by a collection of sources S1,... , Sn and they all attribute their conclusions to a source S, then you can attribute the conclusion to S. (But if you justify this conclusion then you have to name your sources and cite their attribution.) Note that this allows a kind of transitive closure, analogous to imports-closure but without the operational implications. Im sure there are others, but the first one is enough to handle your case, since if I publish a contradiction, then its not going to be any SW-style use to anyone else: they can't use it to do anything that they couldn't do on their own. Pat > -- sandro -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- IHMC (850)434 8903 or (650)494 3973 home 40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office Pensacola (850)202 4440 fax FL 32501 (850)291 0667 cell phayes@ihmc.us http://www.ihmc.us/users/phayes
Received on Thursday, 9 October 2003 19:54:24 UTC