Re: General semantics

From: paul c <toledobythesea_at_oohay.ac>
Date: Wed, 19 May 2010 15:12:42 GMT
Message-ID: <KdTIn.4557$z%6.494_at_edtnps83>

Bob Badour wrote:

> Nilone wrote:
> 

>> 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.
>
> Have you read William Kent's /Data and Reality/ ?

I'd say the breakthrough that made Codd famous was that he saw clear, straightforward ways to implement his structures, as well as his assimilation of several classical techniques. They had general usefulness even if there remains much in human experience that they don't capture, eg., emotion, ethics, sensory feelings. I suppose you could say that Codd's relations 'fall flat' when it comes to imparting feelings but that wasn't his purpose. I don't mean that as a joke, personally it's my main reason for trying to maintain a 'machine-centric' view when talking about db theory - the other territory is too ephemeral, eg., the 'models' we talk about can't replicate anything but themselves.

No doubt Alfred Korzybski couldn't have been hip to the machinery that Codd was but putting that aside the question for me would be what implementation might his writing imply, something akin to Codd's or something else?

Eg., I'd be curious as to who first talked about unary relations, which seem an essential part of Codd's breakthrough. Seems to me that anything 'new' needs to be compared to what Codd wrote (though apparently he had such a practical bent that he saw no need for nullary relations).

(I don't remember seeing them in Bertrand Russell's 'Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy' which might also be interesting to some of us.   Like Korzybski, he came before Codd and Kent's generation, I think he might have stopped writing on such topics by the time Godel made his own breakthrough. I don't know if he gave up because of various logical difficulties or just found other interests, maybe he saw similar obstacles to machine 'understanding', eg., how could a machine ever smell? Even that's a presumptuous question since we know that humans can never smell the way Rosie the dog can.) Received on Wed May 19 2010 - 17:12:42 CEST