From: fortony@sonne.cso.uiuc.edu
Subject: Re: HELP - Ontology of Internet
Originator: fortony@murphy
Organization: University of Illinois at Urbana
Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1992 18:01:43 GMT

jdymond@tartarus.uwa.edu.au (Jason Dymond) writes:

>fortony@sonne.cso.uiuc.edu writes:

>: Popper is unfortunately spouting what I consider to be crap here.
>: Epistemologically speaking, the books he describes contain almost
>: nothing -- if a zulu native picks them up, he might find the glyphs
>: to be aesthetically pleasing, but he is gaining no knowledge.
>: Knowledge requires a knower familiar with the context.

>To use Poppers biological example, you are saying that a wasps nest is
>no longer a wasps nest after the wasps have left it, and if it is never
>again inhabited by wasps. I would suggest that you would still call such
>a thing a wasps nest. Consider also, a long dead language - linear A or
>linear B - do you think that it has no semantic content just because no
>one alive is able to understand it. What happens when it is "cracked",
>and we have access to the content ?

The term for the wasps' nest is "wasps' nest", which is more convenient
than "piece of mud with a hole in it".  I contend that it is no longer
a "wasps' nest" in terms of wasps; there are no wasps to whom the nest
belongs, they have gone; it, the nest, is vacant, etc.

In the same sense, a "home" is a dwelling in which people live.  A "house"
is a dwelling in which people don't live.  [ignore for a moment the obvious
and boring counterexamples and concentrate on the meaning]  When people move
out of their home, they don't leave behind a home -- the item in question
has become referred-to as a "house".  We just don't have a good word for
"vacant wasps' nest".

linear A and linear B are much more interesting.  They are devoid of all
informational content until a knower familiar with the context (see my
verbiage in your quoted article) arrives on the scene.  However, speaking
semiotics for a second, they're "special" -- there was once a messenger
who wished to communicate an idea, so he used linear A/B to illustrate this
idea.  Then ten tons of molten lava, etc, etc, and now we're here looking
at these tablets.  Using the tablets *by themselves*, we are *not able to
gain any sort of informational content whatsoever*.  <-- very important point.
We have to attempt to reconstruct the communicative context.

Really, the communicative context is the vital bit of every communication.
We don't immediately understand this because it's so deeply ingrained in our
selves: if I tell you that I own a red cat, you know immediately that it's
probably got whiskers, ears, a tail, four legs, a penchant for fish, and a 
quality of being indistinguishable against a scarlet backdrop.  If I tell you
"I HATE THESE CUBS" in the middle of a forest surrounded by grizzlies, you get
a different message than if I'm in New York waving a Mets pennant.  For you,
it's automatic.

"semantic content" is in the mind of the beholder.  I profess to you that
if you give me a page of linear A and ask me to make dinner with the recipe
encoded therein, I'm gonna give up and order out for pizza.  In the real
world, 'objective' definitions of "semantic content" are useless and too
vague for constructive application or theory-building.

-- 
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Felix Sebastian Ortony	fortony@murphy.gis.uiuc.edu