Re: [topicmaps-comment] Topic Map Designer and its ilk

["Thomas B. Passin" <tpassin@home.com>]

[Gennadi Bedjanian]

> The discussion about "eternal/changing subject identities", "one
> notion - one topic subject", "situatedness" and on, reminds of the
> language - speech dichotomy. Dictionary meanings of words belong to
> the static language system, while in speech words acquire "situated"
> meanings. They influence each other but never fully coincide. In the
> dynamic speech realm individuals do things together, verbally
> communicate to do things more effectively, and arrive at accepted
> meanings.
>
Dictionaries change much faster than you might think, especially now-a-days.

> If a participant in a communication (= topic map) has a wrong
> understading of a meaning (= topic subject) then something happens
> that makes him rectify the fallacy. For a major misunderstanding it's
> communication breakdown, for a minor - some kind of built-in
> redundancy sustains the communication while the misconcept is
> corrected. Collective communication created the natural language with
> its dictionary and speech as a means to keep the dictionary up-to-date.
>
People got along somehow without any dictionaries for thousands of years.
Maybe not as well as with them, but who is to say for sure?

Cheers,

Tom P