- From: pat hayes <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>
- Date: Mon, 23 Jul 2001 18:41:17 -0700
- To: Graham Klyne <Graham.Klyne@Baltimore.com>
- Cc: w3c-rdfcore-wg@w3.org
>At 02:38 PM 7/12/01 -0700, pat hayes wrote: >>(2) it isnt absolutely clear what 'identify' means, but many people >>seem to think that it means 'denote' > >Pat, could you please offer (or cite) a few words defining 'denote' >for the terminology? Wow. OK, I'll try. Denote. (v) The fundamental semantic relationship between the syntactic and semantic domains; the relationship between an expression and the entity it is interpreted to mean or refer to, expressed (somewhat misleadingly) as an activity of the expression oriented towards the thing. For example, a person can be said be denoted by their name. Hence, denotation (n), the thing or things denoted by a name or expression. Exactly what counts as a suitable denotation for some kinds of expression has been the subject of much debate, eg assertional sentences may be said to denote truth-values, or propositions, or functions from possible worlds, etc.. Typically, a given semantic theory for a human language takes a particular stance on such issues, providing a precise analysis of some range of intuitive meanings while excluding others from consideration. For formal languages, the range of denotations is usually specified mathematically. In formal semantics, an interpretation of a language is specified by rules which determine the denotations of complex expressions in terms of the denotations of their subexpressions, often called a truth-recursion. Note. The relationship between a sign and what it denotes - the denotation relationship - is not considered to have any particular causal or physical significance, in general. Philosophers have noted that if denotation were a physical relationship then it would travel faster than light every time an astronomer mentions a star. Similarly, there is no way, in general, to compute the denotation of a name from the name itself. Both of these observations follow from the fact that the denotation of any expression is only defined relative to an interpretation of the language or notation in which the expression occurs. ---------- --------------------------------------------------------------------- (650)859 6569 w (650)494 3973 h (until September) phayes@ai.uwf.edu http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes
Received on Monday, 23 July 2001 21:41:11 UTC