Re: [] Re: Language and Logic

Jean-Luc,

JFS>> I received an offline note that asked how all this discussion
 >> about historical disagreements between Peirce and Frege is relevant
 >> to anything we need to do today.  How would it help us develop
 >> better AI systems or better language processors?

JLD> Alas...
 >
 > Most of the AI crowd is badly deluded about logic and ontologies
 > except *may be* Jerry Hobbs but it's a useless fight to argue
 > with them.

I agree that some old-timers in the AI field have acquired a solid
appreciation of the complexities of the problem.  That is known as
being "sadder, but wiser."  Two people who spent 40 years working
in formal semantics are Hans Kamp and Barbara Partee.  Following is
a statement by Kamp (2001):

HK> Natural language semantics increasingly takes on the complexion
 > of a branch of a general theory of information representation and
 > transformation. The role of logical inference in the processes of
 > linguistic interpretation indicates an interleaving of inferential
 > and other representation-manipulating operations. This suggests
 > that the inferential relations and operations that have often been
 > considered the essence of logic are better seen as an integral part
 > of a wider repertoire. Thus logic comes to look much more like a
 > general theory of information, than as a discipline concerned more
 > or less exclusively with deduction.

I would revise the last sentence by replacing "a general theory
of information" with "a branch of Peirce's semeiotic."  Following
is a statement by Barbara Partee (2005):

BP> The present formalizations of model-theoretic semantics are
 > undoubtedly still rather primitive compared to what is needed to
 > capture many important semantic properties of natural languages...
 > There are other approaches to semantics that are concerned with
 > other aspects of natural language, perhaps even cognitively
 > "deeper" in some sense, but which we presently lack the tools
 > to adequately formalize.

Barbara hasn't given up on formalization completely.  But it's
interesting to note that she divorced her former husband, a
formal semanticist, and married a lexical semanticist.

The most important quotation that distinguishes Peirce from the
Frege-Russell-Carnap-Kripke-Montague crowd is "Symbols grow."
L'Académie française tried to stop French symbols from growing,
but the effect was a tidal wave of new terms from languages
that allow their symbols to grow.

Unfortunately, the Semantic Webbers suffer from the delusion
that they can stop symbols from growing by attaching a universal
identifier to each definition.  That solution is as effective
as building a picket fence to stop a tidal wave.

John


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