Communications on a
National Project
3/12/2004 2:40 PM
In this comment I reintroduce the
work I did on generalizing the structural framework as a means to achieve a
representation of human knowledge sharing.
However, the issue that is raised by Davis and Walter’s Seybold
article and Davis’s comment
applied equally well to my general theory of frameworks. As John is clearly pointing out, there
is something missing in the viewpoint expressed in the Seybold article, and
this something has to do with a misuse of the term “semantics”.
One might have a general theory that involves, in a
Peircean sense, semantic primitives that aggregate into wholes during the
exchanges between humans. This
type of theory is what Robert Burch communicates in his PhD thesis on Peirce
Burch, Robert (1989).
A Peircean Reduction Thesis, the foundations of topological logic. Lubbock
Texas, Texas Tech University Press.
Burch, Robert
(1996). Introduction to modern Peircean Logic with applications to automated
reasoning, presented at the QAT Teleconference, New Mexico State University and
the Army Research Office, December 13, 1996.
As the “Unifying Logical Vision of Peirce”, ie that
“concepts are like chemical compounds, they are composed or atoms.”
That Peirce suggests this, and Burch suggests that
Peirce suggests; means nothing if there is not eventually an empirical science
that validates such a claim. The
empirical science to support a validation of the Unifying Logical Vision may
develop along the lines that I suggest in:
Chapter 4 - Foundations for Knowledge Science
in that a stratification of the physical processes
involved in memory emergence, awareness and anticipation is conjectured.
Physical chemistry does support the observation, once
a “conjecture”, that a small number of physical atoms (less then 110) are all
that can exist and from which all chemical compounds must be composed.
But we have no such observation in regards to a set
of physical semantic primitives.
In fact, what might be conjectured is that, similar to physical
chemistry, a stratification of processes is involved, but that in the
generation of context for the mental experience, one has a less stable set of
primitives.
We are, however, at the beginning of this science of
knowledge systems.
The problems and issues that I raise in regards to
the presentation of Ballard’s work and related work by individuals who have
been supported by NIST are largely political in nature. But there is a specific criticism of
such statements as
“The direction is towards systems that know,
learn and can reason the way humans do.”
Pg 3 Davis and Walter’s Seybold
article
My claim is that neither Ballard nor Davis or Walter
know how humans reason. The
science is still open on this question.
Our call for a National Project to
develop a k-12, plus college, curriculum in the knowledge sciences is to help
our society to judge this issue more precisely.