At 02:26 PM 7/15/2007, John F. Sowa wrote:
>Barry and Wacek,
>
>I agree with Barry about the normal use of natural languages:
>
> > When I say 'the cat is on the mat' I, for one, am not intending
> > to create a model of reality. Rather, I am attempting to say
> > something about reality itself (this very cat).
>
>But I believe that making an explicit distinction between the model
>and reality is important for any application of formal languages,
>especially those that are processed by any computer system.
>
>A Tarski-style model of a formal language (in fact, the title of
>his famous paper explicitly limited it formal languages) is stated
>as a set D of the entities in some domain of discourse and a set R
>of relations over D. The mapping of D and R to reality is often
>unstated, and for any important application, it's usually far
>from obvious.  (01) 
and Tarski would not say that the sentences (e.g. of cat biology) for 
which we have a formal model are themselves about that model.
BS  (02)
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