Re: I am.

* Pat Hayes <phayes@ihmc.us> [2017-05-18 22:58-0700]
> 
> > On May 18, 2017, at 10:35 PM, Simon Spero <sesuncedu@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > On May 18, 2017 10:34 PM, "Pat Hayes" <phayes@ihmc.us <mailto:phayes@ihmc.us>> wrote:
> > 
> > That is what Descartes claimed. He was wrong. I am more certain that the tree outside my window exists than that I exist. In fact, I am pretty sure that I am a figment of my body’s imagination. Not that this has anything at all to do with RDF, of course. 
> > 
> > [I was at the dentists a few days ago, with the nitrous flowing in through the nasal mask, and a couple of shots of anesthetic in the  lower right side of my face. To check on whether the shots had taken effect, the dentist asked me where I could feel numbness. I voiced strong metaphysical objections. "Urggh", I said. ] 
> > 
> > Getting back to the original statement, there are a few aspects that lack direct support in  RDF.  For example, "I" is indexical, and the proposition embedded in the statement is probably tensed (with the time of the utterance being salient).  
> 
> Indeed, and also the simple ‘am’ is an assertion of existence, which cannot be said (or, perhaps, is trivial) in RDF because RDF (like most formal logics) is based on a semantics in which anything that is named, exists. 

Aren't we wrestling (or rather, goofing around) with the semantics of
the english statement? It leans on a linguistic trick that involves
assumptions about cognition, agency, and agile frames of reference in
which we assume that:

  1 <I> implies some agent capable of uttering a statement, typically
    a human though probably other animals can have some sense of self.

  2 <am> implies some measurable existence dependent on the reference
    frame. In a hallway conversation, we imagine that we can poke the
    person and see that our finger stops. In a fairy tale, we project
    those same physics as a premise of the story.

We make a ton more assumtions but maybe a minimalist statement of this
(without assigning identity to "I") is:

  _:I :state _:exist .
  _:I :supports :Cognition, :Language .
  _:exist [ :universe :MostLikelySharedReality ; :madeOf :Matter ] .


> > Would it be cheating to represent things as an RDF node of type Cycl / IKL / CLIF  assertions, with the actual representation in an attached literal? 
> 
> Well, it’s legal, but it rather takes away the point of using RDF in the first place. Any RDF entailments will not be Cyc/IKL/CLIF entailments and vice versa. 
> 
> Pat
> 
> > 
> > Simon
> 

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-ericP

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Received on Friday, 19 May 2017 10:25:22 UTC