I think that Matt and Josh are both misunderstanding what I said in the same way. Really, you're both attacking the use of logic on the predicates, not the predicates themselves as a representation, and so ignoring the distinction I was trying to create. I am not saying that rewriting English as predicates magically provides semantics.
On 11/28/06, J. Storrs Hall, PhD. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Tuesday 28 November 2006 14:47, Philip Goetz wrote: > The use of predicates for representation, and the use of logic for > reasoning, are separate issues. I think it's pretty clear that > English sentences translate neatly into predicate logic statements, > and that such a transformation is likely a useful first step for any > sentence-understanding process. Whether those predicates are then > used to draw conclusions according to a standard logic system, or are > used as inputs to a completely different process, is a different > matter. I would beg to differ. While it is clearly straightforward to translate a sencence into a predicate expression in a syntactic way, the resulting structure has no coherent semantics.
Translating into a predicate expression doesn't give you any semantics. But it doesn't take any away, either. It just gives you the sentence in a neater form, with the hierarchies and dependencies spelled out.
Consider the following sentences. Could you translate them all using the single predicate on(A,B)? If not, the translation gets messier: On the table is an apple. On Lake Ontario is Toronto. On Hadamard's theory transubstantiation is ineffable. On Comet, on Cupid, on Prancer and Vixen. On Christmas we open presents. On time is better than late. On budget expenditures are dwarfed by Social Security. On and on the list goes...
You used the same word "on" in English for each of them. I thus get to use the same word "on" in a predicate representation for each of them. I don't claim that each instance of the predicate "on" means the same thing! The application of a logic rule that matched any instance of "on(A,B)" would be making such a claim, but, as I tried to explicitly point out, that is a problem with logic, not with predicates as a representation. ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
