Re: Recursive Defs
nebel@cs.uni-sb.de
Organization: Universitaet des Saarlandes
D-6600 Saarbruecken FRG
Message-id: <9008010950.AA18484@fb14vax.cs.uni-sb.de>
To: Ramesh Patil <RAMESH@vaxa.isi.edu>
Cc: INTERLINGUA@vaxa.isi.edu, nebel@cs.uni-sb.de
Subject: Re: Recursive Defs
In-reply-to: Your message of Mon, 30 Jul 90 10:57:51 -0700.
<649360671.0.RAMESH@VAXA.ISI.EDU>
Date: Wed, 01 Aug 90 11:50:27 N
From: nebel@cs.uni-sb.de
Ramesh:
>I however still find the
>example definition of human in your book less than convincing for the
>arguments you make (the arguments are real, but the example is contrived.).
It is always a difficult task to come up with convincing examples.
Nevertheless, I believe that my examples served the purpose of demonstrating
that the original intuitions I (and others) had about cicularly (not
recursively) introduced terms are incompatible and that it pays to
analyze the meaning formally in order to sharpen the intuition about
the meaning of such concepts.
>As for recognition vs definition, I believe that most of the discussion has
>focused on definitional aspects. If one has to deal with recognition, then
>one must take a very different approach, one must define the notion of
>description that are adequate for recognition.
That's an interesting claim. I implicitly assumed that recognition
schemes and definitions are very closely related. Furthermore, I
thought that one of the advantages of terminological logics is that
they provide a means to RECOGNIZE individuals as belonging to the
extension of a concept (by exploiting the definition of the concept).
Thus my question: Can you give examples where the definition is
radically different from the associated recognition scheme for a
concept?
-- Bernhard
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