Friday, December 28, 2007
The Semantic Conception of an Information Resource
From Section 4 of Tarski's 1944 paper, hosted on John Sowa's website, titled The Semantic Conception of Truth: "the fundamental conventions regarding the use of any language require that in any utterance we make about an object it is the name of the object which must be employed, and not the object itself. In consequence, if we wish to say something about a sentence, for example, that it is true, we must use the name of this sentence, and not the sentence itself."
The same can be said about the web: to say of a web document that it is an information resource, for example, it is the name (the URI) of the object which must be employed, and not the object itself. What the current version of the web architecture seems to be saying is that web objects, as opposed to everything else, say what they are themselves. In other words, to make utterances about a web object, you use the web object itself (including the 200 OK), and not its name. This would be like insisting that, when talking about a car, you had to insert the car itself in your speech somehow, as the subject of all propositions about it. This, of course, would seem to have the great advantage that everyone would always be referring to the same car - unambiguously - regardless of any local context. But actually, I think this is an illusion. Objects can't insert themselves into ontological categories. Agents use names to put categories around objects like cars or web documents for particular purposes. The universe just exists, agents say what objects are by using language. So I don't agree it would break the web for each utterance of the name (URI occurrence) of some web object to be used for any useful purpose, even if different from other uses, all while HTTP returns the same object for the same URI.
But even as I try to wrap this up and hit the post button, I see problems with this. By analogy, for example, the fly (object) buzzing around in front of the frog reflects light that physically changes the frogs vision transducers in a distinct, fly-like way. When the frog processes this as a fly, that is, when the frog's brain puts it in the 'dinner' category, it appears very much like it is the very essence of the fly, the fly's fly-ness that does so. Any frog that arbitrarily put it in the 'mate' category, for example, would lead a very short life.
The same can be said about the web: to say of a web document that it is an information resource, for example, it is the name (the URI) of the object which must be employed, and not the object itself. What the current version of the web architecture seems to be saying is that web objects, as opposed to everything else, say what they are themselves. In other words, to make utterances about a web object, you use the web object itself (including the 200 OK), and not its name. This would be like insisting that, when talking about a car, you had to insert the car itself in your speech somehow, as the subject of all propositions about it. This, of course, would seem to have the great advantage that everyone would always be referring to the same car - unambiguously - regardless of any local context. But actually, I think this is an illusion. Objects can't insert themselves into ontological categories. Agents use names to put categories around objects like cars or web documents for particular purposes. The universe just exists, agents say what objects are by using language. So I don't agree it would break the web for each utterance of the name (URI occurrence) of some web object to be used for any useful purpose, even if different from other uses, all while HTTP returns the same object for the same URI.
But even as I try to wrap this up and hit the post button, I see problems with this. By analogy, for example, the fly (object) buzzing around in front of the frog reflects light that physically changes the frogs vision transducers in a distinct, fly-like way. When the frog processes this as a fly, that is, when the frog's brain puts it in the 'dinner' category, it appears very much like it is the very essence of the fly, the fly's fly-ness that does so. Any frog that arbitrarily put it in the 'mate' category, for example, would lead a very short life.
