From: pat hayes ([email protected])
Date: 03/23/01
>pat hayes wrote:
>[...]
> > While I've got your attention on this
> > subject... I think I first ran into it
> > as 'Assertion of another document'
> > in TimBL's semantic web toolbox.
> > http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Toolbox#Assertion
> >
> > In my attempts to formalize it,
> >
> > Ah. I wouldnt try to formalise it in the assertional language
>itself, since its really about the process of making assertions
>rather than about truth.
>
>So much for getting your attention on the subject...
>I intend to formalize the process of making assertions;
>i.e. web protocols.
I agree that is worth doing. I was only saying that I wouldnt try to
formalize them in the same language you are using them in, is all.
That is, it would probably be better to try to keep the language
which is asserted, and the language which is saying things about the
assertions, separate from each other, at least at first, and once
you have that clear, see what happens if you try to smurge them
together. Kind of like using mental scaffolding, rather than walking
on the bricks while the mortar is wet.
I also want to formalize web protocols, but I'm going to try to do it
by creating an ontology of web events first, rather than go looking
for a new logic. For example, making an assertion is more like an
action than a sentence. Which means in turn that no matter how
decorated the logical sentences get (tagging and so on) , as long as
they are always sentences, they will never get to be assertions. If
asserting P is somehow *described* by the sentence 'assert:P', then
something still has to assert *that* sentence in order to get
something actually done. Sentences by themselves never wake up and
get asserted until something asserts them. So there seems to be an
essential gap between the actual performance of something - whether
its making an assertion or digging a ditch - and a description of
that performance in a sentence. The link has to be something like:
the description is true iff the action was done (at the time
specified, by the agent specified, etc., whatever). Now, that "true"
back there is good oldfashioned logical truth in an interpretation,
so what we need here isnt a new logic, but a way to ground assertions
in the intended world of web actions. Its grounding, not reification,
that we need here. Plus of course some language to do the
action-describing in, which I suspect will be pretty minimal; I bet
we could do it as a DAML+OIL ontology, in fact.
>Perhaps not today; but we did talk about getting into
>tagged logic or whatever it takes to formalize this stuff, no?
>Ah yes... I see JimH has the ball...
>
>[[[
>tagging and other forms of well-behaved reification. ACTION (Jeff
>Heflin,
> Jim Hendler): write up SHOE experience.
>]]]
Yeh, exactly. There are sentences being asserted, and there are tags.
One day someone will have to worry about what happens when a tag can
tag a tag and one of them says something about itself which
contradicts what it says in the very act of doing the saying, or some
other vanishing-down-rabbithole type stuff happens; but deal with
that later, would be my intuition.
I'd be very interested in any other ideas you have in this area, by the way.
Pat (Offline most of next week)
PS. If I understand tagging, it it needn't involve reification at
all. You don't need to *describe* a sentence in order to attach a tag
to it, you can just kind of point at it by ostention. And in any
case, reification doesnt get you into the
sentence/assertion-of-the-sentence distinction, which I think is
where one wants to be here. (Maybe I don't really understand tagging,
of course.)
PPS. Dan, do you agree that the ref document ought to say something
about how to make sense of the situation where A imports B and B
imports A ? I tried to make it as neutral as possible, but there is
no way we can legislate against this happening.
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