(cc to www-archive, not www-tag)
Wikipedia: Attrition warfare is a military strategy in which a belligerent side
attempts to win a war by wearing down its enemy to the point of collapse through
continuous losses in personnel and matériel."
If you want an alternative to model theory, start with speech acts, Searle,
Winograd & Flores. You don't have to start with global meaning and add on
contexts.
I want to take this topic off www-tag, though, since it causes people to leave
the TAG or not to consider joining the TAG.
Larry
FWIW, I agree with you about contexts. I have a fairly detailed proposal to make
RDF into a context logic, which could be done without affecting existing
deployment and would resolve, or at any rate ease, a number of contentious
issues, including http-range-14 and the best way to interpret SPARQL
datastores. But it hasnt got any traction partly because people find model
theoretic thinking too difficult, apparently. You can see it at
http://www.slideshare.net/PatHayes/rdf-with-contexts (meat starts at slide 10)
I think that's a start, but it doesn't go far enough, because it doesn't talk
about trust, belief, provenance (except perhaps in a very simplistic way).
And most people stop at what you call the globalist model and get stuck there.
We need to get the naming and the sentential structure clear before we can
begin to make sense of ideas like provenance, belief or trust.
I disagree that doing so is a "need". I understand that is the approach you're
taking, and it isn't working.
Its working pretty well. It handles all the inference-making on the Web, for
example.
Cf "War of Attrition" above. It isn't working for the TAG. I don't know who it
is working for.
A challenge: try to explain any of the use cases of
http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/publishingAndLinkingOnTheWeb.html
using contexts. Explain 'slander'.
I don't think the model which starts with reference and adds provenance,
belief, and trust, is adequate for the kind of analysis needed.
I'm looking for a model that starts with reference being a personal individual
act, and communication is based on correlation through turst.
If reference is a personal individual act, how do I communicate my references to
you?
Will my point be more clear if you change
s/personal individual act/local context/g
in your model?
It is exactly the communication that we need to analyze. And if
communication is correlation, then correlation *of what*? And how is such
correlation achieved? Presumably, by sending messages of some kind. If you
pursue this line of thought, I bet you will quite quickly re-invent Tarski's
theory
of truth. Communication is achieving alignment of beliefs by transmitting
sentences expressing propositions. That is exactly what model theory is about.
If it were "exactly" what model theory was about, you wouldn't have to do all
this extra work.
For example, the notion of "meaning" is tied completely to persistence.... a
use of a URI is "cool" to the extent that its effect on recipients (its
"meaning")
doesn't change (over time or the range of recipients).
Wrong on several counts.
I put "meaning" in quotes because I wasn't using the term in a way I thought
you would agree with. Rather than argue about it, just try it out as a
definition
instead, change "is tied" to "should be tied".
Well, first, why don't you tell me what *you* mean by "meaning" ? Start with a
simple example like "Snow is white." :-)
I'm not interested in trying to define "meaning" or in theories or an architecture of the web that requires one. So I think it's
a rathole, that we don't need to define or use "meaning" "denote" or "identify", or treat "http" as
a "function".
Everest is a mountain, what I mean is something about a place in Nepal, and
mountains. I have no idea what a recipient is going to use this for or what
effect
it might have on them, and that has nothing to do with what I mean.
Humpty Dumpty used words without any idea of what a recipient might use it
for or what effect it might have on them.
Humpty Dumpty said that words mean what he wanted them to mean, because
he was the master. That sounds to me more like your idea that reference is a
purely private matter.
OK, you can sling eggs.
I think you're doing yourself a disservice by claiming you have _no_ idea. You
don't have a complete and accurate idea. When you want to say something, you
say enough, with enough hyperlinks and other reference material, to help the
poor reader.
But suppose that I have no idea who the reader is, or what use they are going to
make of my words? All I can presume is, they understand English (or RDF, etc.).
And surely that is the normal case on the Web. The hyperlinks and reference
materials help the reader better understand what propositions I am trying to
say, sure. But as to *why* the reader might be interested in this stuff, or
*how*
it might influence their behavior, I neither know nor care. We communicate at
the level of transmitting propositions, but it doesn't get more intimate than
that.
You're saying this as if you believe it is "fact" rather than just one of
several models.
(And this is
just as well, since on the Web I cannot *possibly* know what effect it might
have on them.)
Of course, you can't possibly know EVERTHING about what will happen. But
surely it is the writer's obligation to consider the reader.
But not to know so much about the reader that one is setting out to sculpt their
behavior, or still less that this sculpting is the meaning of ones words.
If you want a theory, start with Austin/ Searle / Speech acts.
Second, meaning does not depend upon persistence.
Insofar as communication travels the speed of light or lower, there is a time
delay between the writer writing and the reader reading. Sometimes it's
minutes, sometimes days, weeks, months, years, decades, centuries. Over
many of those time scales, the web changes. Insofar as you intend future
readers to understand what you write, you use terms that will retain some
quality. Perhaps you don't mind if a blogger changes the style of their blog, as
long as the content is still there. The things you don't mind changing are
irrelevant to meaning, the things you mind if they change are highly correlated
with meaning of the link.
All that means is, you try to keep your meaning expressed in a way that will
last.
For example, its not a good idea to use tenses without putting a date on your
writing so that readers can figure out when you are talking about. But all of
this
rests on the fact that your writing is expressing propositions. If you were
writing
music, for example, none of this would apply. You would just write the notes on
the stave, and that would be that. No dates, no trust, no content (other than
the music itself), and no real communication; all because, no propositions.
You have too narrow a view of communication, IMO. Writing notes on a stave
comes with some expectation of behavior of performance, and each note has
a meaning.
If my
uncool URI changes its reference every week, then each week's meaning is
perfectly clear (we can suppose) even though persistence is lacking.
See time delay above.
I wasnt talking about that issue. My point was, that even when there is no
persistence, there can still be perfectly clear meaning. So the latter can't
depend
upon the former.
Nothing is "perfectly clear", "clear" is a matter of degree and never reaches
"perfect". And whatever clarity you have generally decays over time, but
It's hard to imagine a use case where the duration of clarity is infinitesimal.
So no, I think there are no cases where there is "no persistence" and there is
"perfectly clear meaning". If you think you have one, please explain it.
Weekly
magazines might be good examples. Persistence might in fact be better defined
in terms of reference and meaning rather than the other way around: for
example, RDF and SPARQL have spend some time defining notions of
equivalence which allow referents to change 'harmlessly' precisely because the
*meaning* doesnt change.
Exactly, I just think you are looking in the wrong end of the telescope. Turn it
around. Start with persistence, and tell me what you see about meaning.
Nothing much, for the reason above.
Try harder.
f
As long as we talk about statements (triples) or terms (uris) having
disembodied meaning or fail to take into account trust, error and malice, we're
not making progress.... and wasting time.
Until we do get "disembodied" meaning clear, we will never get out of the can
of worms far enough to even get started on these harder problems. I agree
they aren't afterthoughts, but they are thoughts that must come after.
If you start with what you think is the beginning, then yes, other thoughts
must come after. I'm suggesting a different starting point, since the one you've
been using isn't working.
Well, as I say, I think it is working. Progress is slow, but these are
complicated
issues which havnt yet caught the attention of most of the relevant specialists.
Model theoretic semantics has a long history and has been applied to a very
wide range of kinds of language and communication. At the very least, it makes
sense to adapt it to the Web rather than throw it away and try to re-invent the
wheel.
There are other wheels. Try one out, this one isn't helping.
(**) OK, there is a notion of trust where what I trust is that you will *do*
some
predictable thing in response to input from me. In this sense I trust my cat to
look at me when I call his name, and my OS to open a menu when I click on the
desktop background. And this doesnt reat upon communication of propositions.
But I don't think that the sense of trust involved in Web thinking is this
simplistic.
