Re: What do the ontologists want (what URIs denote)

>pat hayes wrote:
>[...]
>
> > The relationship between a URL and the
> > file it locates is not the same as that between a logical name and
> > what it denotes
>
>Er... huh? To me, the whole premise of rdf-logic is that
>the relationship between a URI (URL, if you like) *is*
>the same as that between a logical name and what it denotes.

I know that is widely accepted as a premis. I also think it is 
wrong,[later: see next para]  which is one reason why rdf-logic is in 
such a tangle. It is symptomatic of the general carelessness about 
use versus mention. The point of a URL in large part is that it 
provides an electronic route map to the thing it locates. What you 
get to is something that is readable and from which you might be able 
to make inferences, right? Something like a collection of 
expressions, in fact. Contrast that with a logical name, or indeed a 
name in general. It is not a route map, it does not tell you how to 
locate or arrive at the thing it names, and if you do get hold of the 
thing it names, there's a very good chance that that thing is not 
something that you can read and draw conclusions from. If you start 
with "Pat Hayes" for example and somehow find its denotation, you 
will finish up with something without a single expression on it 
anywhere but which weighs about 170 pounds and has a headache.

Actually to speak more carefully, since the relationship of 
denotation is so weakly specified, what I should have said is that 
the URL/locatee relationship is at best a very, very special case of 
the name/denotation relationship; so special that its connection to 
denotation is hard to even specify other than by just kind of 
declaring that URL shall denote the files they locate (so there) as a 
meta-stipulation. But in this sense, just about any relationship 
between a symbol and anything could be declared to be denotation.

> > (for example, the locatee is not determined relative
> > to an interpretation, but is fixed by the operational circumstances.)
>
>Ben Grosof suggested to me (in the RDF IG meeting in
>Cambridge in Feb) that having a "standard interpretation"
>for a large class of logical names is not unusual;
>i.e. we can take those "operational circumstances"
>as an interpretation.
>
>Not so?

OK, so. Point taken. But then you have to fess up to the fact that 
the relationship between any kind of machine-processable inferencing 
and this standard interpretation has to be grounded in some 
non-logical machinery.

Pat

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Received on Tuesday, 15 May 2001 15:58:42 UTC