Monday, May 23, 2005
Notational Standards
discussion à
The next generation knowledge tools
Dick, Paul, et al.,
It is always dangerous to try to characterize anybody else's point of view [79] and [80]. I wouldn't attempt to characterize Dick's position, but I want to emphasize that his summary of mine is off the mark.
First a brief summary of my background:
1. All of my academic degrees are in mathematics.
2. But in my undergraduate work at MIT, I took the same
theoretical courses as the physicists (but not the labs). In my graduate
studies, I also took several courses in quantum mechanics and related subjects,
including Julian Schwinger's course on advanced q. m. (popularly known as
"Schwinger mechanics").
3. And I had also been working at IBM for 30 years, during which
I had become very familiar with computer hardware and software design and
development and the enormous gap that typically arises between theory and
practice.
4. In addition to those fields, I have a strong background in linguistics, logic, computational linguistics, artificial intelligence and the philosophical issues related to them. Among the philosophers, I dedicated my KR book to the "spirits" of the five great "knowledge engineers": Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Peirce, and Whitehead.
With that preliminary, I'd like to comment on Dick's comments:
RB> It was absolutely vital to him that logic finish its historical quest to master natural languages.....
That has never been a goal, a desire, or wish of mine. I have always been an advocate of Wittgenstein's later philosophy, which emphasizes the enormous problems in any such quest, and I strongly agree with Wittgenstein that logicians such as Frege, Russell, Carnap, and Quine have been hopelessly misguided in their attempts to do something along those lines. See my paper
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/signproc.htm
RB> But by the early 1930s American positivist philosophers had written logic off as a philosophical mistake....
That is not true. In their later years, people like Carnap became discouraged, but positivism was very much in its in the heyday in the 1930s.
RB> Nature was not self-consistent...
That is absolutely false. Nature is quite consistent within itself, but the problems arise from people trying to force some sort of consistency with their preconceived views. Quantum mechanics, for example, makes very consistent predictions. The problems arise when people try to force the micro world to be consistent with their "commonsense" views of the macro world.
RB> John uses the notion of logical algorithms as one pole and Knowledge soup as the catch all for everything else still in a muddle from his perspective.
No!!!! Absolutely not!!! The soup is the way the world works, and logic is an abstraction from the way people think.
The most logical people in the world are the fundamentalists of every stripe: Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Communist, Fascist, etc. They have such a hopelessly naive belief in the power of logic that they refuse to admit any fact that raises the slightest threat of a contradiction with their preconceived vision.
RB> My work of over 35 years has always been profitable...
Congratulations. I also worked for very profitable company for a long time, and I never look down on the ability to make a profit. In fact, my major complaint about Cyc (which I emphasized many times to Doug Lenat) is that he refused to "pay his way" by spending more time on applications that people would be willing to pay for.
RB> It needs self-awareness of its own successful and unsuccessful theory use. Let me assert logic can never do this....
You can assert anything you want, but that doesn't make it so. I agree that pure first-order logic without metalevels cannot support self awareness, but with metalevels it can. Self- awareness involves metalevel reasoning and the ability to go from one metalevel to another as needed. See my paper
http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/laws.htm
John