RE: No Standard Semantic Web Pragmatics?

>>>However, another key idea grew about the same time -- as long as 
>>>we are using URIs, we could make those URIs dereferencable -- that 
>>>is, we could look and see if there is a document there, and if so, 
>>>perhaps that document could describe the link -- RDFS and OWL 
>>>provide vocabularies that live at those links and provide 
>>>information about the "intent" of those relationships.
>>
>>No, that is exactly what they do not provide. That is John's point: 
>>there is a gap here precisely because the SW notations only express 
>>CONTENT, they do not express INTENTION.  The stuff about 
>>performatives in the paper I helped write was intended to be a step 
>>towards bridging this gap, since performatives in natural language 
>>are exactly where an intention is expressed unambiguously by 
>>stating - describing - the intention. If enough people say that 
>>Jack and Jill are married, in the right way and under the right 
>>circumstances, then they are married. If I say "I promise to buy 
>>you lunch" then an actual promise got created: I performed a social 
>>act by saying that I was performing it. Very handy, that is: it 
>>gets you from mere descriptions (which we indubitably have in RDF 
>>and OWL) to actual intentional actions: it gets assertings 
>>(denials, explicit non-assertings, endorsements, whatever) actually 
>>done, and in a publicly checkable way rather than being left 
>>implicit.
>>
>>>
>
>Ah, right right right -- I knew you logician types have this bug up 
>your butts about "intent" -- and that is why I put it in scare 
>quotes, but I should have made it even clear i was using the term in 
>an informal and not a technical sense

So was I, and it's not the logician types who have this bug in their 
butts, its the linguists and philosophers of language. So don't go 
shooting at ME, I'm only the messenger here.

>-- however, that said,I think it is this hangup with "intent" 
>somehow being a mysterious thing

Intention, not intent. I didn't say it was mysterious. In fact its 
not mysterious at all, its quite simple. There are relatively few 
propositional attitudes that are worth cataloguing: asserting, 
agreeing with (maybe, if we want to distinguish it from assertion), 
denying (or disagreeing with) , maybe questioning/querying or some 
variant thereof, and just quoting, which is basically not having an 
attitude.  Its not exactly rocket science, but it does involve making 
a few distinctions, like between proposition and attitude, and 
between publisher and agent.

>that is largely to blame for our lack of progress on this social meaning stuff

Well, if we are going to start hurling accusations around, I think 
the chief reason for lack of progress here is the spectacular 
ignorance of elementary linguistic ideas evinced by people designing 
the languages.

>Consider, if you go to my HTML web page you will see a link to a 
>page that has pictures of my daughter.  You have no way to know what 
>my intent was in putting them there -- you can guess at some 
>possibilities (wrong, I was not trying to raise the price that would 
>be offered for her on the black market) but you can't know what I 
>had in mind.

I don't give a damn what you had in mind. That's not the issue here: 
it is what you are EXPRESSING publicly.  Normally, when you say 
things to people you are understood as asserting them ... unless of 
course you use a questioning intonation, or are in the process of 
telling a joke, or are singing, or reciting, or speaking ironically, 
or have one eyebrow raised in a significant way, or any one of a 
hundred other exceptions.  Real, warm fuzzy human, social conditions 
are amazingly complicated.  I don't want the SWeb to get lost in all 
that, which is one reason Id like us to be a bit more formal about it.

>If I had labeled those photos in RDF, OWL, or KIF there is no reason 
>why I would have told you one whit more about my intent -- I might 
>have made it unambiguous that I was averring that the person 
>depicted in the photograph was one with whom I had the familiar 
>relationship of type daughter -- but you still wouldn't have any 
>intent behind it.

OK, call it averrence rather than intention. I want to know what you 
are averring. I want it to be possible for my software agents to be 
able to know what you mean to 'say' by publishing those pictures (and 
if you don't mean anything, I'd like them to know that). If you don't 
want to express this, OK. Nobody is insisting that you must express 
it. The problem is that some folk DO want to express it, and they are 
hamstrung.  And worse, others want to have it unexpressed but somehow 
inferred by a kind of social default, and that probably doesn't worry 
you (though maybe it should when the SWeb agents are making deals 
with your money), but it sends some people into paroxysms of angst 
about having their intentions, er, averrings, mistaken. So, let 10|3 
flowers bloom, say I, and give those folk a way to be clear about 
what they intend to say.

>So if we simply can argue w/respect to what the links state (in the 
>factual sense)

Hey, be careful. State? Links don't STATE anything. They provide 
access to sentences, is all they do.

>and attribute their ownership based on where they are asserted

Well, even that is kind of sloppy, too sloppy for some folk. But 
that's OK, we have the technology for this, using digital signatures 
and so on. Don't worry, nobody is suggesting making anything 
compulsory. Its more like offering a Brinks security van for those 
who are seriously nervous. Myself, like you, I'll just use the 
regular mail and leave the envelopes unsecured.

>(oops, I mean where the bit stream defining them is found - since 
>assertion is another bug up the arse) - then perhaps we could have 
>made some useful progress on stating "what's in a link"
>
>>>And technically, that is the heart of the Semantic Web 
>>>architecture - links that can be named and described more formally.
>>>
>>>IMO, the social meaning issue arises from the fact that we have 
>>>both referencing and dereferecing going on.  When links share a 
>>>URI, and there's no document at that URI to dereference, then it 
>>>is clear that any meaning of that term is in some sort of off-line 
>>>"Social" conventions between the users thereof.  However, when we 
>>>add the dereferencing it becomes trickier -- because now we have 
>>>to ask if use of the term in some way "commits" to what is in the 
>>>dereferencing document, if the owner of that document controls the 
>>>use of the term, etc.
>>>
>>>There's lots of other "social meaning" issues on the Semantic Web, 
>>>and the threads on this list talk about many of them, but in my 
>>>mind the key ones are those that arise from the issue of the 
>>>relation between the named terms and the documents that describe, 
>>>in some formal way, the use of those terms
>>
>>Well, yes, but (IMO) only because such dereferencing is the only 
>>way to establish any kind of link between a URI and anything that 
>>can be plausibly attributed agency. In order for a promise (etc) to 
>>be done, there has to be an agent doing the promising. Similarly 
>>for asserting, denying, etc. . Without agents (and I really do mean 
>>SOCIAL agents, not software agents) in the picture, all we have is 
>>sentences being looked at: nothing is asserted at all.
>
>well, we humans seem to be social agents who handle this assertional 
>stuff just fine - we know how to differentiate (at least in 
>principle) between "what Pat said" and "What I think Pat meant" - 
>and we usually conditionalize the latter in civil discourse -- seems 
>to me our Sem Web agents could do the same

Oh come on, look what you just said. Humans do it, so our SW agents 
will be able to do it.  (After all, they are little homunculi, right? 
If you listen carefully you can hear them chatting among themselves.) 
This, coming from an AI man with your background and experience ?? 
Shame on you.

>and we could move on to actually looking at this use of 
>dereferencable URIs as something that could add a lot of power to 
>the SW if we had some social conventions/expectations.

Sure, IF we had them, but what John is complaining about is that we 
don't, right now. And the four of us wrote that paper to propose a 
way to express these conventions explicitly using existing (SW+ 
otherWeb) technology. So what's the problem you have with that? We've 
given you a solution on a plate, for goodness sake.

>(i.e. I claim I am legitimized to believe that Peter believes that 
>he is a perfect being by dint of stating it on his page -- I may be 
>wrong, but then I'm usually wrong about what Peter believes, so 
>what's different about this?)

I have no trouble with you concluding something about Peter's 
BELIEFS. But where in the OWL spec does it get into epistemic logic?

Pat

PS I looked up 'epistemic logic' in Google and found this gem,

http://stinfwww.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/~duc/Thesis/node8.html:

" describing actual knowledge is a nearly impossible task: actual 
knowledge does not seem to obey any logic. .... It seems impossible 
to develop a logic of actual knowledge because -- to quote Eberle 
([Ebe74]) -- such a logic must be able to ``provide for total 
ignoramusses (ones who know nothing), complete idiots (ones who 
cannot draw even the most elementary inferences), and ultimate fools 
(ones who believe nothing but contradictions)''"


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