Re: Pizza Example

"Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_REMOVETHIS.pandora.be> wrote in message news:eR_cc.63743$eD5.4200565_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
> Eric Kaun wrote:
> > "Jan Hidders" <jan.hidders_at_REMOVETHIS.pandora.be> wrote in message
> > news:YJZcc.63658$fD5.4201522_at_phobos.telenet-ops.be...
> >
> >>Eric Kaun wrote:
> >>
> >>>I'm certainly willing to entertain language notions - I just haven't
> >
> > heard
> >
> >>>anything concrete enough to serve as the basis for a data model. Loose
> >>>correspondence to English is, in my opinion, not a good metric.
> >>
> >>Did you ever look at the philosophy behind ORM (Object-Role Modelling)?
> >>Or the philosophy behind predicate logic, for that matter?
> >
> > No, can't say I have in any specific way. Pointers/links?
>
> For ORM see http://www.orm.net and as an introcution perhaps
> http://www.orm.net/pdf/ORMwhitePaper.pdf
>
> For predicate logic you can always read Frege's Begriffsschrift. :-)
> Sorry, only kidding. Can't think of a good reference right now.
>
> The point is that all these *are* in fact based upon a correspondance to
> language. In some sense that was what the great discovery by Aristotle
> was: the fact that you can sometimes reason on the basis of only the
> *form* of statements. Hence Formal logic.

Certainly - since computers can't understand meaning in the way that we can (which we ourselves don't understand), it follows that form is about all there is, and thus the mechanizability of symbolic logic. I'm not downplaying the role of language, but languages that computers understand are far different than those we understand. So if we're going to use human language as a basis for computing, we have to specify which aspects of it, or subset of it, and furthermore impose rules that might not make much difference to our comprehension. Received on Thu Apr 08 2004 - 15:58:44 CEST