Meaning

What is the meaning of the sentence "That dog won't hunt." Or maybe of the sentence "Tomorrow is Sunday." Or maybe of the sentence "Two plus two equals four." It's this last question that perplexes Lundberg and perhaps, Wolfgang.

My problem is more basic - what are we doing when we assign meaning to any sentence? The best answer I can come up with is that "meaning" is all about conveying a message from someone to someone else. That means that meaning is contextual - it depends on speaker (or writer) AND on listener/reader. The "Tomorrow is Sunday" sentence has a meaning only in the context of a specific space-time locale. "That dog won't hunt" can be specific but is likely to be metaphoric. "Two plus two equals four" can be an example clarifying the meaning of the word plus, an experimental discovery, or a theorem in Peano arithmetic.

Hope this helps clarify the "ontological status of numbers" - but I'm not optimistic.

I find it slightly amusing that the philosophical study of ontology, or the nature of existence, has been kidnapped by artificial intelligence to mean the specification of a conceptualization, that is, the relationships that exist among concepts (usually words) in some domain of discourse. It is one of the primary tools of machine understanding. I thought my exposure to this kind of operational ontology made a lot more sense to me than the stuff I read in the philosophical literature.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Anti-Libertarian: re-post

The most pointed critique of social security and liberalism in general is the libertarian critique. The problem with libertarians, for a liberal, is that we have too much in common. We both believe in individual rights, tolerance of individual differences, and dislike government prescription of religion. The basic difference, it seems to me, is the different answers we give to Cain's (with thanks to the Captain - my original version had the corpse asking the question!) famous question: "Am I my brother's keeper?" That's not really my basic bitch against the libertarians though. My real complaint is the same as my complaint against most religion - its premise is a fraud. For those who can't stand to wait for the punchline, I believe that trying to implement libertarian principles leads to tyranny or social disintegration. Demonstrating that takes some historical (and pre-historical) context. For all but the last 15,000 or so of the 100,000 years the human spec
Read more

Uneasy Lies The Head

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown ........... Shakespeare Henry IV, Part II. So it is with us and our slightly distant primate cousins , so it seems. A 9-year study of wild baboons in Kenya by Princeton University and the Institute of Primate Research may turn conventional assumptions of alphas males upside down. The study found that alpha males have high testosterone levels, which allows them to dominate other baboons, get access to more food, and attract better mates. This is expected. Surprisingly, though, the alpha males also have high levels of stress hormone glucocorticoid, which scientists measured from their feces samples. In fact, the stress of alpha baboons was on par with low-ranking baboons. The convention wisdom is that access to food and females provides life security and thus less stress for dominant males. Conversely, weak males who are constantly threatened by starvation and physical violence from stronger males are thought to be more stressed. The st
Read more

We Call it Soccer

The US played its best, and maybe only good game of World Cup, but lost thanks to brilliant goalkeeping by the Swedish keeper and the bizarre method soccer uses to settle ties when three US stars could not put the ball on frame from the 12 yard spot.  At the end it came down to a blocked shot that spun in by maybe a couple of centimeters. Well, that's football - too much like life.   Which brings me to a modest proposal.  Replace the thirty minute overtimes with as many 7-player 15 minute periods as needed to settle it.  Scoring should be much easier with fewer players.
Read more