Re: use/mention and reification

On 21 Jan 2002, Dan Connolly wrote:

> On Mon, 2002-01-21 at 04:06, Jan Grant wrote:
> > On 18 Jan 2002, Dan Connolly wrote:
> [...]
> > I still don't understand why you can't pronounce
> >
> > 	<sentence> <rdf:Subject> <mary> .
> >
> > as "the sentence has a subject whose referent is (the person) Mary" -
> > ie, if you just change your intuition about what rdf:Subject "means"
> > does this go away?
>
> Well, yes. That is: it becomes completely useless to me.

Well, I've (re-)read the thread you pointed at, and I'm at a loss. My
intuitive reaction was that your need for quoting was an artifact of the
KIF mechanisms you were using, but I'm not a KIF guru by a long chalk.
Is there something else you can point me at which would enlighten me as
to what you're actually trying to _do_ with reification?

I'm trying to figure out what the fundamental assumptions are that don't
mesh. Danbri seems to be talking about a reification along the lines of:

	jan said "may had a little lamb"

where "said" means, "emitted the following symbols"*, where I prefer

	jan said that mary had a little lamb

(this distinction doesn't render very well in english, I'm afraid) where
I'm attempting to reflect meaning, not the symbols used to convey that
meaning. These two points of view don't appear to be reconcilable.

jan

* I see URI-labelled resources as a neat way to skirt the need for
"contexts" as guha uses (used?) the term: if there's not global
agreement on an interpretation, then use either a private URI (in a
namespace you own) or a blank node.

-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk
Spreadsheet through network. Oh yeah.

Received on Tuesday, 22 January 2002 06:41:14 UTC