[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Syntax and semantics
On Thu, 18 May 2000, John Robert Gardner wrote: > I shudder to reference a rose and its aroma by any other name . . . but > the point in naming is not semantic content but distinguishing. To name, > even with a nonsense word like buwidgerist, is to make a crucial > ontological distinction upon which all semantic content is necessarily > predicated: it makes the thing named _not_ something else. Whatever else > it is beyond that--semantically or otherwise--is dependent upon the > ensuing exchange. > > It is a misnomer, then, to procede under the premise that a name alone > serves no semantic purpose/meaning value. On the contrary, it is the > fundamental premise upon which any expository utterance, digital or > otherwise, is dependent. In and of themselves, the binary "1" or "0" at > the electronic--even subatomic--level (and chaos theory attests to the > import of naming as saying _something_, cf. Heisenberg Principle), say > only what the state of that bit is not. This reminded me of an observation Michael Crichton made in his (non-fiction) _Five Patients_ thirty years ago: that while it may seem strange to hear a physician refer to a particular pathology as "idiopathic" or "cryptogenic" and then speak of it as if it were a definite entity, this usage is entirely legitimate, because the terms don't just imply that we don't know the reason for the pathology; they also imply that we've explicitly ruled out certain reasons. If we say that a patient has "idiopathic cirrhosis of the liver," we've specifically stated that the patient's liver problems are *not* due to alcohol toxicity, among other things. If we say somebody died of "electrical heart failure," we've said that he did *not* die of blocked coronary arteries, malformed valves, autoimmune destruction of the heart muscle, etc. In these cases, the name of the entity doesn't permit discovery of what the entity *is*, only what it *isn't*. But that's still useful. All human uses of language are based on using symbols to reference shared context, with the mapping between the symbols and the elements of the context having been negotiated (constructed) in advance, though not necessarily by the two parties communicating (they don't have to have participated in the negotiations themselves, just to be aware, however dimly, of the result). I am not aware of *any* form of human-to-human communication in which the message (string of symbols) itself encodes not only the references, but also the entire context and the mapping. That is to say, I am not aware of any form of human communication that is meaningful without respect to _a priori_ shared context. Language is constructed, not received. Some of the visions of the Semantic Web I've seen strike me as little more than a desire for robots to "communicate" on behalf of their masters without this necessity for shared context and when I see "autonomous and anonymous" I find myself muttering "and autistic" under my breath. *************************************************************************** This is xml-dev, the mailing list for XML developers. To unsubscribe, mailto:majordomo@x...&BODY=unsubscribe%20xml-dev List archives are available at http://xml.org/archives/xml-dev/ ***************************************************************************
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