[topicmapmail] Re: Logicians do not rule the world (fortunately)

[Murray Altheim]

Before this continues ad infinitum,

I think what Steve Pepper's lighthearted subject line expresses
quite well is that people generally don't like logic, or perhaps
even logicians, who are thought of as cold, calculating, possibly
not even entirely human beings. Logic is a hard tool, a very
precise tool, and it is very good at doing what it was designed
to do. What people want (and will even lie about) is the power
of using the tools of logic without paying the price of the
necessary precision. I see it almost alllll the time within the
"Semantic Web" community, at least by those people who weren't
part of the legitimate Description Logics community, pragmatists
like Enrico Franconi, who understand the power and the limits of
their tools, where they can and can't be properly applied.

We all like to use language that sounds like logic in describing
terms and relations between terms, but absent grounding those
terms in an actual logic, they're just statements of natural
language. Topic Maps permits those same kinds of statements, and
the flexibility and ease of expression that goes with that. But
by the same token, in order to move into the world of logic, i.e.,
to use logical tools, one must gain the necessary precision of
expression in order to use the tool properly. That's all I've
been on about here, really.

Symmetry is a property of relations in certain kinds of logic.
It's also a word in English. So long as we're using it in the
latter sense, and we're clear about that, then everything's fine.
If we want to begin to consider things more formally, to be able
to use tools that rely on formal relations, then we need to
begin to define things a great deal more than they're currently
defined. It's all possible in Topic Maps (e.g., I've long
conjectured that XTM would be a reasonable syntax for interchange
of Cyc expressions, and have played around enough with that to
see both its possibilities and its limitations), but it's not
possible without definitions. One must have a model in order to
be precise in making a statement or specification about something,
and logic provides a model, a framework. Absent that, we're just
talking in English, which is fine, but it's not logical.

Murray

...........................................................................
Murray Altheim <murray06 at altheim.com>                              ===  = =
http://www.altheim.com/murray/                                     = =  ===
SGML Grease Monkey, Banjo Player, Wantanabe Zen Monk               = =  = =

      In the evening
      The rice leaves in the garden
      Rustle in the autumn wind
      That blows through my reed hut.  -- Minamoto no Tsunenobu