Re: [ontac-forum] Re: Semantic Layers (Was Interpretation of RDF reification)

On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 01:23:38AM +0300, Azamat wrote:
> The whole matter is not thus complicated as you think. The talking
> point is that meanings have several basic aspects or dimensions or
> quantities: extensional, intensional, pragmatic and modal.  Intension
> is about a primary meaning or significance, basic definition and
> content and all the essential implications and relations involved;
> while extension relates to special, child classes or individual
> entities. Modality implies mental attitudes towards states, actions or
> changes usually indicated by lexical verbs. Pragmatics is about
> sentence utterances in the context of discourse, human or machine.
> Thus additionally to syntactic and semantic aspects, there is a
> pragmatical meaning involving an agent's intentions and communicative
> acts and understanding of communication. As John Sowa defines: 'a sign
> is an entity that indicates (represents) another entity to some agent
> (a human, animal or robot) for some purpose', in [Ontology, Metadata,
> and Semiotics]

You realize of course that all four of the notions you are describing
briefly above are fraught with controversy and, moreoever, that several
of your own glosses do not jibe with more or less standard treatments.
Notably, vast expanses of the modal landscape have nothing whatever to
do with mental attitudes (which are usually dealt with under the rubric
of "intentionality" with a "t").  It's all well and good that you have
your own account of how everything fits together, but it might be
beneficial at least to acknowledge that your account is your own, and
that it does not necessarily square with a great deal of the relevant
literature.

Regards,

Chris Menzel

Received on Wednesday, 29 March 2006 22:59:09 UTC