SUO: Re: KIF Syntax & Semantics & A Basic Ontology
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Chris,
I have a little (ok, a lot) of trouble reading this due to
the lack of care or maybe the different conventions in the
use of quotation marks. I know it aint easy in ASCII, what
with needing quotes for emphasis and all. But when you write
something like this:
> There is really only one complication that needs attention,
> namely, that an expression of the form (P T1 ... Tn) can occur
> both as atomic sentences and as a term in an atomic sentence.
> Semantically speaking, when occurring as an atomic sentence,
> such an expression has a truth value. When occurring as
> a term, the expression refers to an object.
Do you mean:
> There is really only one complication that needs attention,
> namely, that an expression of the form "(P T1 ... Tn)" can occur
> both as atomic sentences and as a term in an atomic sentence.
> Semantically speaking, when occurring as an atomic sentence,
> such an expression has a truth value. When occurring as
> a term, the expression refers to an object.
?
As far as the substance of this suggestion goes, I know you
are working in some other flavor, so maybe what I say will
not apply, but I used to think that I could get away with
this very thing -- loving polymorphism as much as I do --
and I discovered to my considerable grief that I cannot,
and so there is now a whole subsection of my dissertation
that is devoted to saying why and to building a work-around.
Basically, I had to create two different types of B domains,
there distinguished by single and double underlines, one for
the NP type (or noun phrase grammatical category) and one for
the S type (or sentence grammatical category). Again, this
may be a side-effect of my needing to preserve the option
of a functional interpretation at all times, but you may
want to think about it.
Best Wishes,
Jon Awbrey
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