SUO: Re: KIF Syntax & Semantics & A Basic Ontology
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Chris Menzel wrote:
>
> > 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.
Yes, I understand that part, and I usually take
the locution "of the form" as a pretty reasonable
way to warn the reader to expect an icon rather
than a symbol, that is to say, that the literal
expression that follows, say, "(P T1 ... Tn)",
is an icon of the expression that it denotes
rather than the sort of symbol that the reader
must read, rather than just look at, so to speak,
that is, must read as the sign of an unlike object.
> 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.)
Okay, I really gotta get a look-ahead parser, but just my sense
of it remains that the "of the form" locution should hedge the
explicit quotes which tell you "look at this", and not try to
do it all by themselves, because the automatic tendency to
read text as denoting is just too strong and needs to be
inhibited somehow.
> > 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!
Yes, I eventually decided that, but it slowed me down,
and the "of the form" idiom also serves to gloss over
the ellipsis -- the perceived ambiguity for me being
whether I am supposed to think about a generic form
of expressions like the one that is heralded there,
or whether I am asked to think about a generic class
of objects like those denoted by that genus of signs.
But now that you have said this much, I will probably
be able to remember that you talk (write) this way.
Oh, there was a substantive comment, too --
were you able to make any sense of that?
Jon Awbrey
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