Tuesday, July 25, 2006
Words (or URI) as Locations in the Fabric of Context
When viewed in an absolute sense, I mean when you consider all the different senses in which it may be used, a word like 'bank' is ambiguous. But a particular utterance of the word, in a particular context, is not ambiguous. Now I think it is the utterance in context that is fundamental and it is derived, secondary, and artificial to treat words as absolute and discrete. This requires the view that context is not external to words, but is actually an essential part of the utterance of each word. The word and the context are really one thing, not two. Somehow, a URI, and the context of the semantic web, must be one thing as well. This is sometimes presented as a problem, that of ontological closure, where the meaning of each term is contained in other documents, and the meaning of each of those terms is again contained in yet more documents and so on until, in the end, in order to understand any URI, you must import some extremely large subset of the entire semantic web.
This is not a problem, this is the solution. Each word is merely a location within a context. Its position relative to the context is what matters. When viewed out of context, words have no semantics, nor do URI. Out of context, words revert to mere strings or sounds, possibly with quaint historical accounts (dictionaries, Wordnet) of when they have really been words.
A new proposal: What should be returned when you access an utterance of a referring URI is its location in a context. Now that would be handy.
I started this in a comment to a
post by Bernard Vatant,
0 Comments:
Prior Art
"We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?" "I do." "In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables." "Of course." "But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table." "Yes." "And are we not also in the habit of saying that the craftsman who produces either of them fixes his eyes on the idea or form, and so makes in the one case the couches and in the other the tables that we use, and similarly of other things? For surely no craftsman makes the idea itself. How could he?" "By no means."
Plato, Republic X, page 596a
"This convention is not of the nature of a promise: For even promises themselves, as we shall see afterwards, arise from human conventions. It is only a general sense of common interest; which sense all the members of the society express to one another, and which induces them to regulate their conduct by certain rules. I observe, that it will be for my interest to leave another in the possession of his goods, provided he will act in the same manner with regard to me. He is sensible of a like interest in the regulation of his conduct. When this common sense of interest is mutually expressed, and is known to both, it produces a suitable resolution and behaviour. And this may properly enough be called a convention or agreement betwixt us, though without the interposition of a promise; since the actions of each of us have a reference to those of the other, and are performed upon the supposition, that something is to be performed on the other part. Two men, who pull the oars of a boat, do it by an agreement or convention, though they have never given promises to each other. Nor is the rule concerning the stability of possession the less derived from human conventions, that it arises gradually, and acquires force by a slow progression, and. by our repeated experience of the inconveniences of transgressing it. On the contrary, this experience assures us still more, that the sense of interest has become common to all our fellows, and gives us a confidence of the future regularity of their conduct: And it is only on the expectation of this, that our moderation and abstinence are founded. In like manner are languages gradually established by human conventions without any promise. ..." - A Treatise of Human Nature, Chapter 74
by David Hume
"...Semeiotike, or the doctrine of signs; the most usual whereof being words, it is aptly enough termed also Logike, logic: the business whereof is to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things, or conveying its knowledge to others. For, since the things the mind contemplates are none of them, besides itself, present to the understanding, it is necessary that something else, as a sign or representation of the thing it considers, should be present to it: and these are ideas. And because the scene of ideas that makes one man's thoughts cannot be laid open to the immediate view of another, nor laid up anywhere but in the memory, a no very sure repository: therefore to communicate our thoughts to one another, as well as record them for our own use, signs of our ideas are also necessary: those which men have found most convenient, and therefore generally make use of, are articulate sounds. The consideration, then, of ideas and words as the great instruments of knowledge, makes no despicable part of their contemplation who would take a view of human knowledge in the whole extent of it. And perhaps if they were distinctly weighed, and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic, than what we have been hitherto acquainted with." - AN ESSAY CONCERNING HUMAN UNDERSTANDING
by John Locke 1690
