Matthew West

24 May 2012 09:30

Dear John,

It seems you have a different idea of what a fact is. I would take the facts as how things are in the world. A report of how things are would be a statement rather than a fact.

Regards

Matthew West

Information Junction

Tel: +44 1489 880185

Mobile: +44 750 3385279

Skype: dr.matthew.west

matthew.west@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

http://www.informationjunction.co.uk/

http://www.matthew-west.org.uk/

This email originates from Information Junction Ltd. Registered in England and Wales No. 6632177.

Registered office: 2 Brookside, Meadow Way, Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire, SG6 3JE.

It seems to me that some questions concerning "facts" are missing.
1. Who (and when) declared some statement as a fact?
2. If someone declared something a fact, can't humans (or actor) make subjective errors?
3. What is the life duration of a specific fact?
4. In what situation was the fact true?
5. What is the audience or community for that fact?

It seems to me that facts should be treated as signals in a communication system first. They must be communicated faithfully and the communication system must be capable of communicating any signal for which the system was designed. The system should only qualify and reject signals (facts) that are beyond its capabilities to communicate. In essence, a fact communicating system contains a classifier.

When a signal is received, the information from the signal can be extracted and processed further. Facts in isolation are meaningless statements. They are intended for use by a community. Even when stored for later use, signals and facts should have information associated with them that grounds them or provides hints on their use.

If we are talking about an individual knowing or retaining facts then there is an issue of garbage collection. For a universal system, such as a knowledge web, the management of a collection of facts should be viewed differently.

-John Bottoms
FirstStar Systems
Concord, MA USA

Sez you. What's your theory of facts? What's a beholder? What's a label? You can't just pull stuff like this out of thin air and expect it to be meaningful.

This is a question that could lead to a lot of different threads, that could be amusing or troublesome, and maybe some thread that might be enlightening.

One, that has been brought up below, is the fact that facts are slippery things: what people believe is true, what they are so sure about, they are willing to call it a fact, does not mean it IS true. Back to the theory of knowlege, which does not seem to fair well in this forum, with the total relativists among us seeming to believe (inconsistently) that a fact itself is "just" what somebody believes, inconsistent, because if they assert that, and I believe different, (that a fact is a statement that is true, and a known fact being one that someone is justified in believing (i.e.,knowledge = justified true belief). then we have no argument, since all beliefs are equally true, which leads me to wonder why they bother to converse, since there are no rational grounds for any discovery of what is more likely to be true.

But this is realted to the well known (fact?) that we can't ever be *sure* what is true, so we can't count facts but only justified (and perhaps unjustifed) beliefs, and the well known (fact) that only a surprisingly small number of the statements made on the Web appear to be true.

Another is how do you **count** facts? For almost 40 years, in the mid last century, started by Russel and Wittgenstein's idea of an atomic fact, carried forward by Carnap, might have suggested a way. For example, take the fact that I have 10 toes, and i know this is true, at least the last time I looked. Then, there are other facts that I know on reflection, such as that I have at least 3 toes, and that I do not have exactly 7 toes, and that I have fewer that 11 toes. In fact, going forward, we have an **infinite** number of facts: for each n, the fact that I have fewer than n toes, where n is greater than 10. I think the atomic facts in question are 10 in number, that I have toe 1, toe 2, etc. The problem with this is that atomic facts are based, as Mathew Lange says, on relationships between known entities, and how do we count these? The foot, the toes, the 26 bones in the foot, the 356 blood vessels?

So, it seems one needs an ontology of types of things, and a count of the instances of each type, and then perhaps the factorial of the sum of those counts, might be the number of possible atomic facts in the world identified by that ontology. Then, the total number of facts would be the sum of all the atomic facts expressible in each ontology. I suspect the fact that most of these possible atomic facts would be false would not change the order of magnitude of the answer. It would seem that how many of these possible facts could be known depends on the availability of knowers.

This all might lead to a reasonable investigation or to a Zen moment, or both..








--
William Frank

Billions is several orders of magnitude too small, to be sure--but then again you were talking about beholders, not the facts themselves...wiuch leads me to think that we perhaps could estimate a ballpark average number of facts that a beholder needs to know for various levels of sophistication in particular knowledge domains--including "common sense".
In addition to ability--Malcolm Gladwell's, 10,000 hours must be roughly translatable in terms of "knowable entities".
Just looking for ballpark here...surely someone has investigated this in terms of knowledge engineering...

Alexander Titov

23 May 2012 21:45

Matthew West

23 May 2012 21:29

Another is how do you **count** facts? For almost 40 years, in the mid last century, started by Russel and Wittgenstein's idea of an atomic fact, carried forward by Carnap, might have suggested a way. For example, take the fact that I have 10 toes, and i know this is true, at least the last time I looked. Then, there are other facts that I know on reflection, such as that I have at least 3 toes, and that I do not have exactly 7 toes, and that I have fewer that 11 toes. In fact, going forward, we have an **infinite** number of facts: for each n, the fact that I have fewer than n toes, where n is greater than 10. I think the atomic facts in question are 10 in number, that I have toe 1, toe 2, etc. The problem with this is that atomic facts are based, as Mathew Lange says, on relationships between known entities, and how do we count these? The foot, the toes, the 26 bones in the foot, the 356 blood vessels?

Chris Menzel

_________________________________________________________________

Message Archives: http://ontolog.cim3.net/forum/ontolog-forum/

Config Subscr: http://ontolog.cim3.net/mailman/listinfo/ontolog-forum/

Unsubscribe: mailto:ontolog-forum-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Shared Files: http://ontolog.cim3.net/file/

Community Wiki: http://ontolog.cim3.net/wiki/

To join: http://ontolog.cim3.net/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?WikiHomePage#nid1J