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From: John F. Sowa <sowa@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: [ontolog-forum] <ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, 18 February, 2009 3:19:20 PM
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] a skill of definition - "river"

Frank,

Almost none of the concepts that anybody has learned spring
into existence fully formed at a precise point in time.
They grow and change throughout a lifetime.

FK> But you can tell the date of the concept that you have
> created in your mind to identify that hut in Your head.

Absolutely not. The example of a log cabin is one that I
had used before, but each time I use it, it evolves.

In my previous note, I imagined a builder who had no idea
of building a log cabin. He just laid a few logs next
to a tree to make a temporary shelter. The idea of a
shelter gradually evolved into the idea of a log cabin.
That is typical of all our ideas.

FK> I do not understand this obsession with syllogisms and
> reasoning based on syllogisms in order to do, for instance,
> machine translation based on statistical data.

I certainly agree. A well-trained carpenter or an engineer
in any field has a very large toolkit and many different
skills. They use a hammer for one task, a saw for another,
and a drill for something else. To build intelligent systems,
you need to know many different aspects of intelligence and
have a very large collection of tools and skills.

FK> And to make an ontology learnable to must forget about
> formal logic.

You need different tools and techniques for different purposes.

FK> Instead, we should be seeking procedural knowledge that
> shows how you arrive at a concept and how you can act, not
> just glare at the ideas the frozen into "maps" that show
> non existing pints in 2D connected by a straight line
> indicating nothing, but a hazy association.

Procedural methods are very important for many kinds of tasks.
They are an essential part of any knowledge engineer's toolkit.

As I said, I've covered these issues many times before. Please
read the papers before making any assumptions about what I am
proposing. You can start with the "Challenge of Knowledge Soup":

http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/challenge.pdf

For an outline about how to integrate and use a wide variety
of different kinds of tools and techniques, see "Architectures
for Intelligent Systems":

http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/arch.htm

For psychological issues, see "Categorization in Cognitive
Computer Science":

http://www.jfsowa.com/pubs/cogcat.htm

Following is a more recent talk about three applications that
use the VivoMind technology:

http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/pursue.pdf

The last slide of that talk (and other talks in that directory)
has pointers to other papers for further reading.

John


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