Re: thisiness

On 25 Mar 2011, at 12:38, Gregg Reynolds wrote:

> 
> (BTW, there are no unlabeled nodes; what seem to be unlabeled nodes are in fact anaphorically or indexically labeled.  An unlabeled circle in a diagram is still a symbol, a kind of indexical label; where nesting is used syntactically to indicate a blank node, the syntactic device of nesting can be taken as a kind of indexical label or symbol.  In other words, the difference is not between labeled and unlabeled, but between persistently and transiently labeled (or: between rigidly and contigently labeled) nodes.)

yes, that is what I was getting at in my last post. Blank nodes allow non rigid designation. URIs tend to be rigid designators. Somehow in philosophy this distinction seems to have been very helpful. It would be interesting to follow through on this parallel and see if we don't find the same usage and value on the semweb.

Henry


Social Web Architect
http://bblfish.net/