Re: General semantics

On May 18, 11:19 pm, Erwin <e.sm..._at_myonline.be> wrote:
> And I fail to see what "general semantics and it's correspondences to
> the relational model?" has to do with this delusionary nonsense of
> "relations being flat".

I read "multi-dimensional order" as "n-dimensional data structure", and it seemed to me that Korzybski aptly described the relational model and its possible application to language and mental models of empirical data. As I progress through the book, I find that perspective reinforced.

> But in natural language, it is perfectly normal and perfectly
> acceptable to employ idiomatic expressions and figurative speech. In
> discussions which are supposed to be scientific, that is much less the
> case.

I suspect this thread leans too far into the philosophical for the regulars of c.d.t. I derive my desire to understand the relational model from its value as a metaphysical model of reality.

> Relations are n-dimensional, with n being equal to the degree of the
> relation concerned.  That's a well-established fact.
> Relation variables have a corresponding (logical) predicate, which is
> supposed to have the same "degrees of freedom" (logical variables ?)
> as the degree of the relation variable and the relations it can
> contain.  Replacing each "logical variable" occurring in the predicate
> with the appropriate value from a tuple from the body of the relation
> that is the current value of the relvar, yields a logical proposition
> that is (assumed to be) true.  That's a well-established fact too.

Well stated.

> Now since "semantics" essentially means "meaning", and "meaning" is
> formalized in logic as predicates and propositions, that's where you
> have your "correspondence between semantics and the relational model".
>
> But perhaps I'm simplifying too far.

Most of the book discusses exactly that. The author aims to replace the mereological view of reality with one based on relations. In fact, he goes as far as to reduce domains to an equivalence relation over the attributes of relations, which just blew my mind. Received on Wed May 19 2010 - 10:43:35 CEST