Re: [topicmaps-comment] Everchanging subjects [Re: Notions haveexistence ...]

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

Everyone's understanding of everything, including words, constantly changes
and adjusts with learning and experience.  With this in mind, how can the
subject described by a public subject indicator be understood as something
precise and unchanging?  For example, consider a PSI for a class-subclass
association.  I dare say that some people may have thought that this is a
simple, clear-cut, unchanging subject.

But the RDF core team has just decided that cycles will be allowed in a
class-subclass series of relationships.  Previously, that was not understood
to be the case and cause a disconnect with DAML_OIL.

Another example - if I say the the subject of my topic is Steve Newcomb,
your understanding of this specification depends partly on your
understanding of what a "person" is, and what an instance of a person is,
and possibly on what you think I understand a person to be.  These things
are understood differently by different people in the same culture, let
alone between different cultures.

Furthermore, most things are understood metaphorically or at least with a
large metaphorical component (see George Lakoff's works, for example).  This
can be seen as getting to fit more or less well to a sort of complex
structural template that was devised for some other situation.

On the other hand, it is often not necessary to know the subject exactly in
order to work usefully with it, if you know the rules for using it.  That's
like proving theorems in geometry without knowing what a "line" is supposed
to be.  It can be done.  Or like using a computerized theorem prover - the
prover knows nothing about the subjects exceot what type they are and what
rules they have to follow.

So you can in actual real life make a lot of progress without knowing
exactly what the subject is.  Is this good enough for machine processing and
use?  Ah, that's another thing, isn't it?  But it probably gets in the
formal rules of use area more than anything else.

You might to know that the heavy thinkers on the RDF-Logic group are arguing
just now about how to connect computer representations of RDF resources to
real-world addressable and non-addressable subjects.  It's not just us...

Cheers,

Tom P