Danny Ayers wrote:
On 16 June 2011 02:26, Pat Hayes <pha...@ihmc.us> wrote:
If you agree with Danny that a description can be a substitute for the thing it
describes, then I am waiting to hear how one of you will re-write classical
model theory to accommodate this classical use/mention error. You might want to
start by reading Korzybski's 'General Semantics'.
IANAL, but I have heard of the use/mention thing, quite often. I don't
honestly know whether classical model theory needs a rewrite, but I'm
sure it doesn't on the basis of this thread. I also don't know enough
to know whether it's applicable - from your reaction, I suspect not.
As a publisher of information on the Web, I'm pretty much free to say
what I like (cf. Tim's Design Notes). Fish are bicycles. But that
isn't very useful.
But if I say Sasha is some kind of weird Collie-German Shepherd cross,
that has direct relevance to Sasha herself. More, the arcs in my
description between Sasha and her parents have direct correspondence
with the arcs between Sasha and her parents. There is information
common to the reality and the description (at least in human terms).
The description may, when you stand back, be very different in its
nature to the reality, but if you wish to make use of the information,
such common aspects are valuable. We've already established that HTTP
doesn't deal with any kind of "one true" representation. Data about
Sasha's parentage isn't Sasha, but it's closer than a non-committal
303 or rdfs:seeAlso. There's nothing around HTTP that says it can't be
given the same name, and it's a darn sight more useful than a
wave-over-there redirect or a random fish/bike association. I can't
see anything it breaks either.
You could use the same name for both if each name was always coupled to
a universe, specified by the predicate, and you cut out type information
from data, such that:
<x-sasha> :animalname "sasha" ; :created "2011...." .
was read as:
Animal(<x-sasha>) :animalname "sasha" .
Document(<x-sasha>) :created "2011...." .
the ability to do this could be pushed on to ontologies, with domain and
range and restrictions specifying universes and boundaries - but it's a
big change.
really, different names for different things is quite simple to stick
to, and considering most (virtually all) documents on the web have
several different elements and identifiable things, the one page one
subject thing isn't worth spending too much time focusing on as a
generic use case, as any solution based on it won't apply to the web at
large which is very diverse and packed full of lots of potentially
identifiable things.
best, nathan
