Re: sowa v. hayes

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Reply-To: cg@cs.umn.edu
Date: Thu, 6 Feb 1992 17:04:34 PST
From: Pat Hayes <hayes@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>
Subject: Re: sowa v. hayes
To: sowa@watson.ibm.com
Cc: macgregor@isi.edu, hayes@cs.stanford.edu, interlingua@isi.edu,
        srkb@isi.edu, cg@cs.umn.edu, Pat Hayes <hayes@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>
In-reply-to: Your message of Tue, 4 Feb 92 12:24:14 EST
Message-id: <MacMS.6946.17515.hayes@sumex-aim.stanford.edu>

John, greetings.

These messages get longer very quickly so I will restrict myself here to one
key point where it is clear that we differ. For you, the crucial source of
meaning is natural language, while for me it is some kind of model theory, ie
an account of how the formalism describes the world.  Your horseradish is my
rice, and maybe vice versa.

This shows up in many ways. You celebrate the idea of having surface syntactic
differences in English mirrored in differences in the formalism, which is
anathema for me since it would mean two different sentences could never have
the same meaning. You talk of the mapping to and from natural languge as being
a matter of semantics, while I regard it as largely a matter of linguistics. 
You go from Quine's bound-variable dictum directly to talk of verbs and nouns
in a way which to me is puzzling since I see no reason to impose categories
which arise in the grammatical theory of one of the world's many spoken
languages into the basis of a Krep discussion.  And so on. We are playing
different games.  I wish you luck with your game, but I don't see what natural
language has to do with the KIF effort. 

If anyone wants to see detailed replies to John's recent magnum, reply to this
message with a request and I will forward it to you.

Pat



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