Re: ccodes and rcodes

Ramesh S. Patil <ramesh@vaxa.isi.edu>
Message-id: <9009181610.AA04210@vaxa.isi.edu>
To: Michael Genesereth <mrg@sunburn.stanford.edu>, Interlingua@vaxa.isi.edu,
        hayes@parc.xerox.com
Reply-To: ramesh@venera.isi.edu
Subject: Re: ccodes and rcodes 
In-Reply-To: Your message of Mon, 17 Sep 90 15:23:59 -0700.
             <CMM.0.88.653610239.mrg@Sunburn.Stanford.EDU> 
Date: Tue, 18 Sep 90 09:10:53 PDT
From: Ramesh S. Patil <ramesh@vaxa.isi.edu>

Mike,

    > Ramesh,
    > On the paradox business.  The comment was intended primarily for those
    > who are concerned about this issue (mostly logicians).  

This I believe is precisely the source of confusion. My argument about
lack of relevance of logical paradox with respect to CCODE is not a
parochial argument.

    > We are not legislating away the expression of such odd-sounding
    > sentences.  What we are doing is guaranteeing that our notiono f
    > interpretation remains complete. For logicians this is very important.

And how are you going to guarantee completeness and decidability without
limiting "the expression of such odd-sounding sentences"?  Is there some
magic that I am not aware of?

    >  For logicians this is very important.  For mortls like me,
    > it does not really matter.  But I just wanted to assure those guys that
    > this is not going to be a problem.   
    > 
    > mrg

I have been having trouble following arguments for a while.  I believe
the problem is that you seem to take two different positions when
dealing with two different perceived camps.

Now for clarifications:  In my message I was echoing and elaborating on
Pat Hayes's comment (Pat if I misunderstood you, please correct me).
If one considers CCODE then the existence of paradox is not a damning
thing.  Let me re-emphasize my point just this once more:  Chinese,
Spanish, English, Hindi, French all are natural languages much more
widely in use than first order predicate calculus (with or without
quote!!!).  It also suffices to say that each of these languages has a
significant tradition of philosophical literature which attempts to
convey fairly precise and well circumscribed concepts.  I am sure that
in many of these languages people have heard of Russell's paradox too (I
did in Hindi before I was fluent in English) and none of these have
prevented from people communicating with each other or understanding
everyday commonsense concepts or concepts requiring high degree of
precision such as physics or engineering.  Even papers in Journals such
as mathematical logic are written in English aren't they?

How and to what these english (or other natural language) messages get
translated into and how they are used in further reasoning are
legitimate questions and relevant to the issues of RCODE. Computability,
precision, etc. become relevant questions for this.

-- Ramesh