Kashori - Semantics for Social Agents

Semantics for Agents

Friday, November 18, 2005

Comment on Danny Ayers', "Context, What Context?" 

I posted this on Danny Ayers' blog post Context, What Context?

Actually, even your scenario shows the need for context. For example, in the context of a string concatenation library, "5 + 1", would equal "51".

I would count myself as among those you are trying to "get past" with this argument. My condolences, it didn't work.

Interestingly, even as you deny there is a problem to be solved, your attitude seems pessimistic, since it would make of the semantic web just a really big calculator, a global machine where semantic events occur only at the human interfaces. We already have that in the current web. This is a far cry from the vision of the founders, "The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present." - The Semantic Web.

I am one who does see a problem here, that is, with a system for building a highly extensible language where anyone can invent new symbols but there is no standard way for achieving common knowledge of either the referent or the sense of those new symbols. Never-the-less, I am actually optimistic that we can build a semantic web with machines that are "better able to process and 'understand' the data". See my blog post, The Semantic Web Awaits Real Semantic Machinery for one possibility. And because our intuitive understanding of the effect of the exponential growth of progress is deficient, I think we will all be surprised at how soon this happens.

Also, I don't believe there are two semantics, one for humans and one for mathematicians, logicians, and computer scientists. What are they then, aliens? Mathematics, logic, and computer science are human endeavors, aren't they? Why is meaning in mathematics not human? Rather I think there is just one semantics, at most, to make a twist on Whitehead's quip about Unitarianism.

# posted by John Black @ 5:29 AM
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• John Black

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"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a

"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74 by David Hume

"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING by John Locke 1690