-Caveat Lector-
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Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 11:56:58 -0800 (PST)
From: Franklin Wayne Poley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
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Subject: [R4P] ROBOSPEAK, NEWSPEAK and the Basic Formal Language of Logic
Wilfrid Hodges who has a doctorate in logic writes in his book, "Logic"
(1991) that "The simplest grammars which are of any use at all are the
so-called context-free grammars, or CF grammars for short...They are
hopelessly inadequate to deal with a full-grown language like English. BUT
THEY ARE COMPETENT TO HANDLE THE BASIC FORMAL LANGUAGES OF LOGIC...."
(p.80). IMO they cannot handle full-grown English because our language is
fraught with confusion and confounding and we simply don't consciously
know most of the rules we use when we speak English. Homo sapiens indeed!
I disagree with Hodges about "hopelessly inadequate" above (blocks are
mine, BTW) and I will explain why in more detail.
We can build up a version/style/sub-set of Standard English from the
"logic language" of CFG and there is no doubt about that. The only
question has to do with how far it can go. I will argue for "semantic
comprehensiveness" but I welcome any and all arguments to the contrary as
long as they stick with the points made and do not launch into ad hominem
attacks and such. Debating fallacies are are distraction and waste of
time.
Remember that my doctorate is in phil-psych so I examine the writings of
logicians as a psychologist too. I noticed that a big part of
philosophical analysis has to do with wrestling with Standard English and
putting it in a form so that truth-table testing can be applied. In
essence the analyst is saying, "What do you really mean by _________?"
That kind of implicit question is also found in logic analyses of the more
"sophisticated" statements in formal logic like "if___then____" and "if
and only if" statements as well as the statements of predicate logic. I
can refer anyone interested in pursuing this further to logic texts with
the appropriate tables of substitutions. The substitutions reduce these
more "sophisticated" statements in logic to the "basic formal language of
logic" which is combinatorial logic; all that are required at this level
are grammatical AND/OR/YES/NO to accompany the
propositions/expressions/descriptors and their T/F valuations. So there
you have the seven components of this basic formal language of logic.
And each of them has a different physical/hardware analogue in the modern
digital computer.
Robospeak is then built UP from this context free grammar, according to
whatever context is applicable and according to the descriptor letter and
word strings the teacher wishes to impart to the machine. This approach to
NLP knows the rules all the way along so we don't have the problem of the
direct approach to NLP. It is focused on COMMUNICATION and not on finding
the algorithms or rules of normative Standard English. As long as I am
teaching my pr or pc to say things in a known context and I understand
those descriptor letter and word strings which I am substituting into the
basic formal language of logic, I can keep going. And I DO know the
context and meaning of what I am superimposing on that basic formal
language of logic or I don't teach it to the machine.
How far can I go? It takes many years to impart the knowledge of adult
normative Standard English to a child, starting at age 1-2. If I were to
teach my pc "robospeak", that too would take years. But so far I cannot
see any way this teaching-learning would be limited except by my own
knowledge of the surrounding world. As an example, I could teach it the
dialogue necessary to function as my arithmetician. It would learn to
respond to my arithmetic questions in grammatically correct Standard
English with grammatically correct answers in Standard English. It would
even pass the Turing Test if limited to arithmetic (or other maths as
taught). If Stephen Hawking is in one room answering my arithmetic
questions in grammatically correct English and R4P is in another room
doing the same and both have visual barriers so I can't see them, I won't
know which is homo sapiens and which is robo sapiens.
The other monologues and dialogues I might teach R4P would not necessarily
be in normative Standard English. But remember that the purpose of
teaching robospeak is COMMUNICATION and that alone. This is a matter of
semantics, rather than lexicon and syntax per se. We "plug into" the basic
formal language of logic (which is also a sub-set of Standard English
syntax) only those portions of the Standard English lexicon which meet one
semantic criterion: WE UNDERSTAND THEM. And so far it looks
to me like robospeak is a style of Standard English which can take on
semantic comprehensiveness at an adult human level. In other words, I
should be able to impart as much understanding of the world as I
CONSCIOUSLY have, to R4P, in the paraphrasings of robospeak. The fact that
I do not CONSCIOUSLY know most of the rules for the Standard English which
I speak does not prevent me from paraphrasing or translating it into a
style or form for which I do consciously know the rules. How? Because I
know the semantics of it, the MEANING. In the vernacular, "I know what I
am talking about".
FWP
PS- So far it looks to me like the language of the current president is
taking us closer to Orwellian "newspeak". Remember how Orwell in 1984
translated the introduction to the Declaration of Independence ("We hold
these rights to be self-evident...." etc.) into "doubleplus ungood
crimethink". So I prefer that we create ROBOSPEAK as an alternative to El
Moron's NEWSPEAK. I am quite convinced that El Moron is some kind of
zombie who does not know what he is talking about most of the time.
Robots will soon take their place in everyday life as super-intelligent
SOCIAL entities which can have a salubrious effect on curbing the wanton
drifting of Her Majesty's language into moronically juvenile jingoism and
jibberish.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2003, Franklin Wayne Poley wrote:
> Hi Gary:
>
> I think I asked you a long time ago on R4P if all arithmetic/logic/maths
> could be accounted for by binary or Boolean logic, ie reduced to binary
> logic, and you said yes. If you know of any maths which cannot be handled
> this way, could you please give us an example? My few courses in college
> stats, calculus and matrix algebra are not enough to answer this question.
>
> Schildt has a chapter in his C and AI book on programming formal logic in
> C. He claimed that even predicate logic could be handled by a C program so
> that means it is reduced to binary logic, right? I put that out on R4P as
> a question and nobody answered so I went to some texts on predicate logic
> and satisfied myself that the English language statements of predicate
> calculus could be reduced to the English language statements of Boolean
> logic, aka combinatorial logic.
>
> I also think that any and all of the MEANING we wish to convey in Standard
> English can be paraphrased and reduced to the compound sentences (linked
> by AND, OR) which are built up from simple sentences, starting with a kind
> of "picture-vocabulary". Imagine yourself raising a child this way. You
> start with simple words identifying objects and build up the word strings
> which are joined by AND, OR only. Each word string in a simple sentence is
> just another DESCRIPTOR like the objects you started to identify and teach
> the child. So all you have are DESCRIPTORS and CONNECTORS with T/F values
> and that is the form or style of Standard English your child will know.
>
> IMO, this Standard English form of combinatorial logic will achieve
> "semantic comprehensiveness", ie it will enable the child to eventually
> convey all of the MEANING, ie the semantics of Standard English using the
> DESCRIPTORS of Standard English in lieu of the usual lexicon and the
> CONNECTORS of combinatorial logic in lieu of other kinds of syntax. Try it
> out on an imaginary child and see if it works.
>
> FWP
>
>
> *** The Era of Total Automation is Now ***
>
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>
>
>
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