Pei, Chapter 3 of Chris Fox's book "The Ontology of Language: Properties, Individuals and Discourse" is on "Plurals and Mass Terms." It seems to address this issue, among many others, using an axiomatic framework that is founded on predicate logic. It also gives a lot of references into the related literature.
What Fox is doing is unorthodox -- he introduces Property Theory, which (very generally speaking) is a way of dealing with intensionality within a predicate-logic context. But he references a lot of more traditional predicate-logic expressions.. Personally, I think his approach is frighteningly overcomplicated, and I tend to agree that the term logic approach is simpler and more elegant. So your statement that "it's hard to infer on uncountable nouns in predicate logic" is just right. It's not true that predicate logic can't handle uncountable nouns... it's just that the mechanisms conventionally used to do so, seem to get too complicated too fast. Novamente's inference module uses a semantics based on set theory, and I don't believe it will have any trouble dealing with mass nouns, though. It's a question of how the sets involved are set up.... If you treat the concept of "water" as the set of instances of water that the system in question has observed, experienced or heard about, you don't run into any problems. In other words, if you use an experience-grounded set-theoretic semantics, rather than an abstraction-grounded set-theoretic semantics, then it seems to me things work out just fine, and very simply. -- Ben > -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On > Behalf Of Pei Wang > Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 11:01 AM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: [agi] uncountable nouns > > > I'm working on a paper to compare predicate logic and term logic. One > argument I want to make is that it is hard to infer on > uncountable nouns in > predicate logic, such as to derive ``Rain-drop is a kind of liquid'' from > "Water is a kind of liquid'' and ``Rain-drop is a kind of water'', (which > can be early done in term logic, as the one used in NARS). > > This is a problem because predicate logic treats a predicate as a set. If > you force a uncontable noun to be used as a set, it can be done, but it is > not natural at all, and the distinction between "countable noun" and > "uncountable noun" is gone. > > I browsed the website of CYC and cannot found how it is handled in CycL, > which is based on predicate logic. Maybe Steve (or others) can give me a > clue. > > The related conceptual issue is whether all concepts should be treated as > sets. My answer is no. > > Pei > > > > ------- > To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate > your subscription, > please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED] > ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
