Re: Reification

From: "pat hayes" <phayes@ai.uwf.edu>

> >From: "Graham Klyne" <GK@ninebynine.org>
> >
> > > Until this, I never got any sense that open world negation was
> > > impossible.
> >
> >Maybe that's because open world Truth is impossible too.  Rather Truth is
> >relative to active processes. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a kind
of
> >propositional attitude that each agent calculates for it's self.
>
> What on earth are you guys talking about? Truth and falsity have got
> nothing to do with the openness or closedness of the world, and
> nothing much to do with activity or processes.

Well I can't speak for Grahm, but I hope I know what I meant.   Now I will
be talking quite informally, so if i mis apply a precise term, I apologize
in advance, and would ask for you to try to look behind my sloppyness, for
whatever, if anything, may lie beneath.

If someone creates a formal system in which all axioms, syntax, and
operations are specified;  then the statements of such a system can be
considered True\False and we can operate on that state with negation.  I
would call such a system "closed".  The opposite situation is where the
axioms and operations are not all known - perhaps the only thing that is
known is the syntax of the statements.  I would call such a system "open".
My thesis, of course, is that the real world, that world in which we human
agents seem to live and also the world we inhabit when we surf the web, is
open and that there does not seem to be any absolute or formal meaning to
the description of statements as True\False or the negation of that
description.  In other words Truth in the real world and on the web is
relative.

How far afield am I here ?

... thanks in advance for helping with my education ...

Seth

Received on Monday, 9 April 2001 14:07:14 UTC