The latest exchance included on the
weakness of objective- subjective categories. I could add a few ideas from
the perspective that human judgement is model based and the quality of models
differ based on what has gone into establishing them and the nature of the
subjective of the model.
RC> I think the concepts of
"objective" and "subjective"
> are essential concepts in AI
applications....
JS>Those two words are related to some very
interesting
issues, but they are so vague that they're not useful
terms to
adopt. Summary: Cognitive models are extremely important,
and Peirce's
semiotic terminology is an excellent set
of concepts for analyzing and
representing them. But
the words "objective" and "subjective" are too
weak.
Historically there was the argument
that an objective truth involves some type of "agreement" or
"correspondence" of our mental
models with its object. Thus my
observation about a penny being round reflects my mental model and your mental
model and its tuned by experience with a penny to correspond. I could test out the model by rolling
the penny for example. Other parts
of my mental model lead to the idea of subjective judgments. Both are mediated by models but the
objective ones are more like validated theory and the subjective ones more like
hypotheses. Or one could speak of
some not as tuned as others. Certainly it is not as easy to know
whether or not our "model" of peoples intentions "corresponds" or "agrees" with
the person’s (assumed) real
intentions – these are more like pragmatic hunches and could be very affected by
biases. We may call these types subjective, but there may be degrees and so the
simple dichotomy of objective to subjective is not the best.
Gary
Berg-Cross
-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa
[mailto:sowa@bestweb.net]
Sent: Wed 3/23/2005 7:50 PM
To: Rich Cooper
Cc: Jay Halcomb; Alexander Povolotsky;
abdoul@CYTANET.COM.CY; Gary Berg-Cross;
standard-upper-ontology@LISTSERV.IEEE.ORG
Subject: Re: nature ->
"human brain" -> "language terms" ==>> knowledge
?
Rich,
I completely agree. That's the point I was
trying
to make in my notes to Alex:
RC> As you know (since you
described Peirce's concept
> of thirdness), agents have
intentions, and use language
> to achieve their objectives.
Those areas are of far
> more interest to AI than the physics of
objects. How
> does agent A1 perceive another agent's (A2)
actions?
> That depends on how A1 thinks A2's belief system
is
> laid out, A2's current goals and so on.
Those are the
real issues: how do you model Thirdness
(or to use other terms,
intentions, goals, purposes)?
That gets into really interesting
problems.
RC> I think the concepts of "objective" and
"subjective"
> are essential concepts in AI
applications....
Those two words are related to some very
interesting
issues, but they are so vague that they're not useful
terms
to adopt.
Summary: Cognitive models are extremely
important,
and Peirce's semiotic terminology is an excellent set
of
concepts for analyzing and representing them. But
the words
"objective" and "subjective" are too
weak.
John