Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland?/Various issues

phayes@cs.uiuc.edu (Pat Hayes)
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Date: Mon, 17 Oct 1994 17:43:16 -0600
To: fritz@rodin.wustl.edu (Fritz Lehmann), cg@cs.umn.edu, srkb@cs.umbc.edu
From: phayes@cs.uiuc.edu (Pat Hayes)
Subject: Re: CCAT: TIME: Fantasyland?/Various issues
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> The
>annoying thing is that, on the one hand, turning temporal order
>relations into tolerance relations loses logical transitivity, but on
>the other hand we in fact assume and use transitivity for the common-
>sense versions of these relations except in extreme borderline
>("pathological") cases.

No, I think we reason very subtly about this issue throught our daily
lives. A cook has a well-developed sense of when he can be sloppy with the
measuremrnts and when not: a carpenter has explicit techniques for
oversoming some of the nontransitivity, like making a master stud and
taking all measurements from it, rather than transferring one to the next.
Everyone knows how a lot of little 'ignorable' errors can add up to a big
error. We have childrens stories and legends to push the point home. You
find this everywhere, it pervades our lives. Thats why its so exasperating
to not be able to formalise it properly.  


Pat
 


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