On 4/28/07, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
And what if I say to you: "sorry but the elephant did sit on the chair" - how would you know that I could be right?
I could assign a probability of truthfulness to this statement that is dependant on how many other assertions you have made and the frequency with which those assertions have proven to be accurate models of the eventual reality they predicted or described. If after a sufficient number of occurrences of truthful assertions, there is a level of trust associated to the believability of your future statements. Suppose you intentionally lied to me. Future probability assignments would have to include the measurement of your proven inaccuracy. Hopefully a system built on this principle has some failsafe for statements like "I am lying."
except in rare cases no such rules. You've actually made them up - and your brain did that for you by using its imagination. It's only by imagination that you can work out which of thousands of animals can or can't sit in a
Is imagination derived from earlier encounters with elephants and chairs? My original mental picture was a cartoonish elephant in an equally cartoonish chair. I had no details of weight or physics - I assumed the elephant was the primary object of the sentence and therefor the chair would need to accomodate the elephant. If the sentence were "the chair was sat on by an elephant" it would have conjured a different meaning due to the primacy of the objects. This is where an unambiguous language would help prevent the parse errors inherent in english (or possibly even human language in general) ----- 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/?member_id=231415&user_secret=fabd7936
