Re: SUO: Re: KIF Syntax & Semantics & A Basic Ontology
> > > > 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.
> > >
......
>econd extract seems to be referring not to
> > the subtleties of quotation, but to the need, as he sees it,
> > to maintain a sharp distinction between expressions which are
> > thought of as referring to things (NP type) and expressions which
> > are thought of as making assertions (S type). This is traditional
> > in most versions of logic, but Menzelian ingenuity seems to have
> > made this distinction unnecessary. One can always adopt it,
> > if that feels more comfortable, of course, but there seems
> > to be no pressing semantic need to do so, as far as we can
> > determine. Jon, in case we have missed something, can you
> > tell us what was the source of your grief?
> >
> > Pat Hayes
>
>¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤~~~~~~~~~¤
>
>Pat,
.....
>The other concern was yet another one of those lessons
>that I learned the hard way, forced to the point of it,
>amounting to an obstruction into which I ran full tilt
>when, in spite of my natural traditionalism, I dared to
>try and best my nature with a piece of ingenerity whose
>phenotype gives it the appearance of being superficially,
>in any case, very much akin to this Menzelian inheritance
>that you nomenate here, still, it did not prove itself to
>be inescapably mutagenic until I, somewhat late in the game,
>got down to the brass syntactical business of trying to design
>a rigorous proof-format for the correspnding expressions, and
>then I discovered that this whole house of cards would fall
>down around my ears unless I tossed in explicit rules for
>converting back and forth between the two types -- and
>you must believe me, I resisted this with all my might,
>but then, perhaps my might is not so mighty, after all.
>Anyway, this is how I remember it -- it's written up
>in a part of my dissertation that I have not visited
>in a year or so, and did not completely work out the
>last details of my best fix -- I will go look for it.
We are reasonably sure that we have namged to overcome all the
syntactic problems that might seem to arise here. Over a decade ago,
in fact, KIF blurred the strict distinction between function and
relation names, and this hasnt produced any syntactic or
proof-theoretic problems so far (though it has given some users a
kind of headache.)
We are writing this up carefully right now, and will circulate it to
the SUO list when it is readable. We welcome you (or anyone) finding
any bugs we may not have noticed.
Pat Hayes
---------------------------------------------------------------------
IHMC (850)434 8903 home
40 South Alcaniz St. (850)202 4416 office
Pensacola, FL 32501 (850)202 4440 fax
phayes@ai.uwf.edu
http://www.coginst.uwf.edu/~phayes