Re: SUO: Re: KIF Syntax & Semantics & A Basic Ontology
> 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.
> > ...
>
> 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.
Well, actually, no, though I admit that the way I put it is not
excruciatingly correct. The problem with your suggested correction is
that ordinary quotes turn the expression in question into a name for
that very expression, i.e., the expression left paren - upper case P -
space - upper case T - the numeral "1" - and so on. And that is not
what I mean, as "P", "T1", and "Tn" are *metavariables* that can take
any terms of the language as value; I don't mean to be talking about
that very expression. Hence, what are really needed here are
so-called Quine corners, or corner quotes, which work sort of like the
LISP backquote operator, in whose scope variables (properly marked)
can continue to function as variables that can take values. But we
have no corner quote ASCII characters, and rather than invent them, I
simply used the expression "of the form" as a sort of corner quoting
operator to tip off the reader that the expression to follow is a
general schema, and that "P" stands for any term and "T1 ... Tn" any
row of terms. (Though there may be other places where I end up using
quotes as corner-quotes where they might have been a danger of
ambiguity -- I'm sure I could have been more careful still.)
> 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.
I agree that quotation is a delicate matter indeed. But I must say,
Jon, that, in this case, I am quite puzzled as to what you could
possibly find problematic here. I really don't see any reasonable
interpretation of the passage in question other than the one I
intended. I'm clearly not *using* the expression, and it's also clear
that I don't intend to be talking about just that one single
expression (with the ellipsis, it's not even a legal KIF expression).
That the expression is a schema for all KIF sentences of that form,
i.e., all atomic sentences) seems to me to be the only game in town!
Best wishes,
-chris
--
Christopher Menzel # web: philebus.tamu.edu/~cmenzel
Philosophy, Texas A&M University # net: chris.menzel@tamu.edu
College Station, TX 77843-4237 # vox: (979) 845-8764