Nabble - Conceptual Graphs

Sentiment and perspective analysis

2009-12-18T08:40:29Z

The problems of analyzing sentiment, perspective, and spin are
critical for many kinds of language processing. The following
note to Corpora List cites some useful resources.

The dissertation by Stephan Greene presents "graph-based methods"
that could be adapted to or used in conjunction with CG software.

The PDF file of the dissertation also includes many pointers to
other publications and collections of documents that were used
in the research.

John Sowa

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [Corpora-List] UMD Death Penalty Corpus
Date: Fri, 18 Dec 2009 10:51:48 -0500
From: P Resnik <psresnik@...>
Reply-To: resnik@...
To: CORPORA <CORPORA@...>

I'm happy to announce the availability of a corpus related to
sentiment/perspective, for purposes of non-commercial research.

The University of Maryland Death Penalty Corpus (or UMD DP corpus, for
short), at http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik/dp/ , is a collection of
material from Web sites that express views for and against the death
penalty. It was compiled by Stephan Greene
<http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/%7Esgreene/> as part of his doctoral
dissertation
<http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/%7Esgreene/SGreeneDissertationFinalDist.pdf>:

Greene, Stephan C. (2007). /Spin: Lexical Semantics, Transitivity,
and the Identification of Implicit Sentiment/. Doctoral Thesis,
University of Maryland, College Park, MD. UMI Order Number:
AAI3277427, ISBN 978-0-549-16038-0.
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~sgreene/SGreeneDissertationFinalDist.pdf

Key elements of that work are reported more briefly in:

Greene, Stephan and Philip Resnik, "More than Words: Syntactic
Packaging and Implicit Sentiment", /Proceedings of Human Language
Technologies: The 2009 Annual Conference of the North American
Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics/ June,
2009, Boulder, Colorado, pp. 503-511. Association for Computational
Linguistics}, http://www.aclweb.org/anthology/N/N09/N09-1057.pdf

The downloadable corpus is organized in a way that should make it easy
to replicate the cross-validation train/test splits in Stephan's study,
to facilitate direct comparisons among alternative methods.

Have fun, and happy holidays,

Philip

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CfP - epiSTEME 4 Conference, HBCSE, Mumbai, India. Jan 5-9, 2011

2009-12-18T08:37:42Z

First Announcement and Call for Papers

epiSTEME - 4

Fourth international conference to review research on Science,
TEchnology and Mathematics Education

Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (TIFR), Mumbai, India, 5-9
January, 2011

http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/episteme4

Conference epiSTEME-4 is the fourth in a series of biennial
conferences aimed at reviewing research world-wide in science,
technology and mathematics education. It is being organised by the
Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, a National Centre of the
Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai, India.

Science, technology and mathematics education (STME) have, in recent
decades, emerged as lively new research areas. This research,
inspired by issues of learning and teaching, has clear uniting themes
in the cognitive, pedagogical, historical, philosophical and
socio-cultural aspects of the sciences.? The epiSTEME conferences
occupy a unique position among conferences and bring together
researchers in these foundational areas as well as from the domains of
science, design and technology and mathematics education. Conference
epiSTEME-4 continues this tradition of interdisciplinary exchange.

The name epiSTEME connotes, at one level, a systematic study of
knowledge, while as an acronym it suggests a meta-view of science,
technology and mathematics education. The previous epiSTEME
conferences, held in 2004, 2007 and 2009, have catalysed collaborative
programmes among researchers and educational practitioners in India
and abroad. Within India, they have helped to initiate and foster
linkages between theory, empirical research and the work of grassroots
organisations.

Structure of the conference:

Three broad strands of research that impact STME will form the core of
epiSTEME-4. Themes have been identified under each strand to reflect
active research topics and areas of interest. Leading scholars will be
invited to give overviews of some of the themes within each
strand. Paper and poster sessions will complement the review
talks. Pre and post conference workshops are being planned, the
details of which will be announced later. The strands and themes are
presented below.

Strand 1. Historical, philosophical and socio-cultural studies of STM:
implications for education
Theme 1: History and Philosophy of STME
Theme 2: Socio-cultural and gender issues in STME
Theme 3: Science and Technology Studies

Strand 2. Cognitive and affective studies of STME
Theme 1: Visuo-spatial thinking
Theme 2: Knowledge representation
Theme 3: Language and learning
Theme 4: Problem solving, learning and reasoning

Strand 3. Curriculum and pedagogical studies in STME
Theme 1: Assessment and evaluation
Theme 2: Role of ICT in teaching-learning
Theme 3: Classroom interaction and discourse
Theme 4: Affective aspects of learning
Theme 5: Professional development of teachers
Theme 6: Educational initiatives and innovations

Review Speakers
David Barlex, Brunel University, UK
Poonam Batra, University of Delhi, India
Susantha Goonatilake, World Academy of Arts & Science, Sri Lanka
Pratibha Jolly, University of Delhi, India
Helen Longino, Stanford University, USA
Nora Newcombe, Temple University, USA
Masakata Ogawa, Tokyo University of Science, Japan
Jonathan Osborne, Stanford University, USA
Mamokgethi Setati, University of South Africa, South Africa
K. Subramaniam, Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, India

Call for Submissions

Papers are invited on the themes listed above. Submissions must be
made online in the form of full papers of 6-8 pages (maximum of 8
pages including references). Details and a template for submission may
be downloaded from the conference webpage.

All submissions go through a double-blind review process. Accepted
papers are published in the Proceedings, distributed during the
conference and can be downloaded from the conference site
(http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/episteme). Review talks along with the
discussions are documented in a series of volumes called The epiSTEME
Reviews.

Dates to remember:
Submission of full paper/poster write-up: April 1, 2010
Notification of acceptance: July 1, 2010
Submission of revised paper: August 1, 2010
Registration with payment: September 1, 2010
Dates of conference: January 5-9, 2011

Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education (Tata Institute of
Fundamental Research), V. N. Purav Marg, Mankhurd, Mumbai 400 088,
India.

Email: episteme4@... ; episteme4@...

Fax: 91-22-2556 6803, 2558 5660,

Tel: 91-22-25580036, 2555 5242

Convener, epiSTEME-4
http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/episteme4

Meena.
--
"I link, therefore I am"
......................................................
Meena Kharatmal
blog --> http://okeanos.wordpress.com
twit --> http://twitter.com/meena74
web --> http://www.hbcse.tifr.res.in/~meena
......................................................

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[CMC-l] cmc2010: Call for Papers / 4th Int. Conf. on Concept Mapping

2009-12-17T15:30:54Z

==================================================

Call for Papers

CMC 2010 - Fourth International Conference on Concept Mapping

Viña del Mar, Chile - October 5, 6 ,7, 2010
Sheraton Miramar Hotel & Convention Center

Website: http://cmc.ihmc.us
Contact: cmc2010@...

The Fourth International Conference on Concept Mapping follows on the success of the first three Conferences held Pamplona, San José, and Tallinn/Helsinki in bringing together scholars and practitioners interested in concept mapping. It is being organized by the Universidad de Chile and the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, USA.

The Conference is aimed at all persons interested in the use of concept maps (based on the work of Dr. Joseph Novak), including, but not limited to: facilitation of learning; eliciting, capturing, archiving, and using “expert” knowledge; planning instruction;  assessment of “deep” understandings; research planning; collaborative  knowledge modeling; creation of “knowledge portfolios”; and administrative and strategic planning and monitoring. We expect participants from a broad range of fields presenting a wide variety of research and applications of concept mapping.  All presentations at the conference are expected to include time for questions, answers, and scholarly discussion.

Electronic paper submissions can be submitted in the following categories:

• Paper Proposals: Papers are reports of completed research accepted by a panel of experts and peers and will be published in the conference proceedings. There are three categories for papers: (a) empirical research, (b) model or theory development, and (c) theorizing from the literature. The time allotted for each session is 30 minutes (20 minutes presentation/10 minutes discussion). Audience participation, as a principle of adult education, is stressed.  Full papers submissions have a length of up to 8 pages.

• (*NEW*) Research Roundtable Proposals: Research roundtables provide an opportunity to informally discuss research in progress and research issues with a group of participants. A 2 page summary/abstract will be published in the conference proceedings. The time allotted for each session is 50 minutes. Several roundtable discussions will take place concurrently in the same room with each presenter assigned to a different table.

• (*NEW*) Symposium Proposals: A symposium presents diverse or conflicting perspectives on a compelling topic or issue that is or should be of concern to concept mapping community.  A symposium should NOT be merely a presentation of a related set of papers.  Symposia should include a 4 page formal paper and this paper will be published in the conference proceedings. The time allotted for each session is 50 minutes. Audience participation is encouraged.

• Poster Presentations (with paper):  The posters will form a visual display prepared by conference participants describing a research initiative, program, pedagogical model, and/or best practice on how concept mapping is applied in a variety of settings.  Poster   presentations serve as an effective forum for the exchange of information and a means to communicate ideas, research, and programs. Poster papers should have a maximum length of 4 pages and will be published in the conference proceedings.

• (*NEW*) Poster Presentation (without paper).  Posters that do not include a formal paper will also be accepted for presentation at the conference.  Participants can submit a 500 word abstract if they are interested in presenting a poster without writing a formal paper.  The abstracts will be reviewed for selection at the conference.

• (*NEW*) Electronic Posters. There will be a limited number of electronic posters accepted at the conference.  Electronic posters can be posters with or without a formal paper. The number of electronic posters available will be determined by the host site for the conference, and the decision will be made on space available and cost.

All papers should be written and presented in Spanish or English. The Proceedings of the Conference will be published as a book by the University of Chile and posted on the Conference web site.

All papers from previous conferences are available at http://cmc.ihmc.us and can be searched at http://www.cmappers.net.

Time-line for Proposal Submission Process

INITIAL CONFERENCE PAPER/PROPOSAL SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  April 19, 2010

To submit a paper, roundtable, poster, symposium, or showcase please go to the following web site: http://cmc.ihmc.us. For each type of presentation follow the directions as to the page numbers and the format that is posted there.

DECISION RETURNED TO PAPER AUTHOR(S):  June 7, 2010

FINAL CAMERA READY SUBMISSION OF PAPER FOR INCLUSION IN CONFERENCE  PROCEEDINGS:  July 19, 2010

CONFERENCE DATES: October 5, 6, 7, 2010

Program Committee Chairs

Jaime Sánchez, Universidad de Chile, Chair
Alberto J. Cañas, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Co-Chair

Steering Committee, cmc2010

Barbara Daley, University of Wisconsin-Milawaukee, USA
Simone Conceição, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Priit Reiska, Tallinn University, Estonia
Steve Cook, DOD, USA

===================================

--
S. Cook
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RE: Peirce's graphs as the foundation for the Semantic Web

2009-12-15T00:27:55Z

Nice! Marie-Laure already sent me a link tot he slides, and I joped that a videolecture will be published. THenaks for the link!

Frithjof

-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@...]
Sent: Dienstag, 15. Dezember 2009 06:04
To: cg@...
Subject: [CG:] Peirce's graphs as the foundation for the Semantic Web

That is the topic of a talk that Pat Hayes presented as a
keynote speaker at the International Semantic Web Conference
in October. Following is the video of his talk:

http://videolectures.net/iswc09_hayes_blogic/

Pat Hayes was intimately involved with two important projects:

1. The semantic foundations for the Common Logic standard.

2. The semantic foundations (LBase) for RDF.

In fact, most of the differences between Common Logic and the old
KIF result from the requirements for making Common Logic support
the semantics of RDF.

In that talk, Pat discusses Peirce's graph logic, and he makes a
modest proposal for future directions for Semantic Web languages:

1. Adopt RDF as the foundation for *all* semantic web logics
and extend it to the full expressive power of Common Logic.

2. Instead of "layering" OWL and other languages on top of RDF,
make RDF the most general language and *embed* other logics
as special cases of the newly extended RDF.

3. The technique that Pat advocates is one that C. S. Peirce
developed for his existential graphs.

For people who may not be familiar with Peirce's graph logic,
point #3 is not likely to be obvious.

However, I had been making some slides for a tutorial on Common
Logic, and I started with Peirce's graph logic at the beginning.
I still haven't finished the full set of slides, but the part
about Peirce's graphs is sufficient:

http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/clintro.pdf
Introduction to Common Logic

This is still incomplete, but the parts on EGs are sufficient
for an introduction. I strongly support Pat's proposal, and I
believe that it would be an important first step toward providing
an adequate semantic foundation for the Semantic Web.

John Sowa

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Peirce's graphs as the foundation for the Semantic Web

2009-12-14T21:03:56Z

That is the topic of a talk that Pat Hayes presented as a
keynote speaker at the International Semantic Web Conference
in October. Following is the video of his talk:

http://videolectures.net/iswc09_hayes_blogic/

Pat Hayes was intimately involved with two important projects:

1. The semantic foundations for the Common Logic standard.

2. The semantic foundations (LBase) for RDF.

In fact, most of the differences between Common Logic and the old
KIF result from the requirements for making Common Logic support
the semantics of RDF.

In that talk, Pat discusses Peirce's graph logic, and he makes a
modest proposal for future directions for Semantic Web languages:

1. Adopt RDF as the foundation for *all* semantic web logics
and extend it to the full expressive power of Common Logic.

2. Instead of "layering" OWL and other languages on top of RDF,
make RDF the most general language and *embed* other logics
as special cases of the newly extended RDF.

3. The technique that Pat advocates is one that C. S. Peirce
developed for his existential graphs.

For people who may not be familiar with Peirce's graph logic,
point #3 is not likely to be obvious.

However, I had been making some slides for a tutorial on Common
Logic, and I started with Peirce's graph logic at the beginning.
I still haven't finished the full set of slides, but the part
about Peirce's graphs is sufficient:

http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/clintro.pdf
Introduction to Common Logic

This is still incomplete, but the parts on EGs are sufficient
for an introduction. I strongly support Pat's proposal, and I
believe that it would be an important first step toward providing
an adequate semantic foundation for the Semantic Web.

John Sowa

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Cactus Language and Differential Logic

2009-12-14T07:20:18Z

There's an update of my introduction to Differential Logic at this location:

http://mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey/Papers/Differential_Logic_:_Introduction

This begins with a brief discussion of a formal system for propositional calculus,
the parse graphs of whose expressions are roughly what graph theorists call "cacti",
with axioms and equational inference rules that derive from C.S. Peirce's system of
"alpha graphs", the propositional part of his "existential graphs".

Jon Awbrey

cc: Arisbe, CG, Cybernetics, FOM, Inquiry, SUO

--

inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
knol: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/1
mof: http://mathoverflow.net/users/1636/jon-awbrey
mwb: http://www.mywikibiz.com/Directory:Jon_Awbrey

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Ray Solomonoff

2009-12-12T18:00:10Z

Ray Solomonoff, one of the few surviving participants in the 1956
Dartmouth conference that defined the field of AI, died on Dec. 7
at the age of 82. Following is a brief announcement:

http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/

Following is a list of his publications:

http://world.std.com/~rjs/pubs.html

His most recent publication (2009) is an overview of the field
of algebraic probability and its use in inductive inference,
for which he was one of the founders and a major contributor.

He was also an advocate of Strong AI -- the goal of developing
superhuman computer systems. Following are some lectures and
articles from 2005 that explain why he believes that goal is
a promising area of research:

http://world.std.com/~rjs/lects.html

John Sowa

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic MORE re CHANGE

2009-12-10T15:32:12Z

Another way to express your thought, Rich, might be to say, "Yes, that's the way the world doesn't work."

It is often like that, I agree. I have not yet found any broad discipline--science, law, government, education, business, medicine, banking, art--that lists skills for creative change teamwork. There seem to be few exceptions that have "inventing change or changing themselves, if required, to help others in ways that others become enthused about, aspire to, grow with."

A recent, happy, specific departure expressed in the CG family is Jon Awbrey's stance of our helping 5th grade teachers help their students do logic. This is aligned with something different from proving or improving CGs or CSs. Similarly, it is different from a company's profit-making as a sufficient goal or a government's preventing attacks by terrorists. It is different from being "right" or "brilliant" or "status-having" or "risk-avoiding" or "tenure-deserving."

I remember John Sowa writing, "If you believe it, go do it!" To me, it meant, "do it no matter what excuses can be made to not attempt change! Invent ways!"

For me, the "it" is to help people invent change and make change happen which enhances, for example, children, government, science, etc.. Change is signaled by being able to describe an "old" method and a "new" method and the result--not merely a performance improvement with the old method.

Methods of change-inventing are skills. Some are nontraditional. Some examples:

* "definition of what is to be changed" does not have an obvious method. A problem need not exist for change to be considered and invented.
* "ideas" and "suggestions" can be different in type from "recommendations" and can reasonably be reacted-to quite differently.
* "discussion" is a way to encourage animosity, diffusion, and position-taking.
* "Robert's Rules" 600 pages address who has power, not change-invention, not teamwork.
* "asking why?" is a good way to kill momentum toward change. It can be a defense of present methods. There are more powerful questions.
* "scientific method" is not very change-imaginative. It says nothing about skunk-works teams, for example.
* "being creative" is only one part of change-imagining. It sometimes leads to competition, not helping one another.

These are busy days, aren't they. Good luck and good holidays!

David Cox

Rich Elk wrote:

Yes, that's the way the world works.  Entrenched interests dig deeper to
preserve their investments, while new interests find the best place to
invest their own lives.  Nobody gives it away without at least a plan to get
even more back.  

The young have all the fun, and the old have all the security.  

-Rich
 
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [sowa@...] 
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 4:45 AM
To: cg@...
Cc: Jon Awbrey's Inquiry Project; Arisbe List
Subject: Re: [CG:] Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

Jon,

The answer to that question is obvious:

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
 > have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
 > imagination that many of us have long believed they ought?

They have caught the imagination of every student who has ever
studied the subject.  But the hardest task is to get *professors*
to study anything:

  1. For an assistant professor, the primary goal is to get tenure.
     That requires not only a long list of publications in reputable
     journals, but a list of citations by respectable people (usually
     other professors).

  2. Papers in respectable journals are reviewed by professors and
     their graduate students.  (The more respectable the professor,
     the more likely that students will do the reviewing.)

  3. Students and professors give high scores to papers that make
     incremental improvements to familiar paradigms.  Anything outside
     a familiar paradigm is likely to get a low score.  (A colleague
     showed me a rejection note, in which the reviewer wrote "I never
     saw anyone do anything like this before."  Any research that is
     significantly different from other published research is not
     considered respectable.)

  4. For an associate professor, the primary goal is to get promoted
     to full professor.  (Copy the comment from point #1.)

  5. Full professors are generally in output-only mode.  That means
     they are not likely to read anything that is not directly related
     to getting more funding for their department.  And very few funding
     agencies give grants for R & D on Peirce's graphs.

As just one more example, some graduate students at Stanford tried
to publish a paper on something called a "page rank" algorithm for
evaluating relevance of information.  But that idea was outside any
respectable paradigm, and the students had a little project with
the childish name Google.  So of course, the paper was rejected.
Eventually, however, their project made enough money that they had
enough funds to get the attention of full professors.  That made
their paradigm respectable.  Now, many papers use the term "page
rank" in their titles in order to make them sound respectable.

John

PS:  At large conferences such as IJCAI, the most exciting
presentations are in workshops, not in the main sessions, which
are reserved for boring papers that get high scores.  The ones
that get "best paper" awards are ones that nobody could find
any excuse for rejecting -- they are invariably the most boring.


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RE: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-10T11:07:08Z

Yes, that's the way the world works. Entrenched interests dig deeper to
preserve their investments, while new interests find the best place to
invest their own lives. Nobody gives it away without at least a plan to get
even more back.

The young have all the fun, and the old have all the security.

-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: John F. Sowa [mailto:sowa@...]
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 4:45 AM
To: cg@...
Cc: Jon Awbrey's Inquiry Project; Arisbe List
Subject: Re: [CG:] Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

Jon,

The answer to that question is obvious:

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
> have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
> imagination that many of us have long believed they ought?

They have caught the imagination of every student who has ever
studied the subject. But the hardest task is to get *professors*
to study anything:

1. For an assistant professor, the primary goal is to get tenure.
That requires not only a long list of publications in reputable
journals, but a list of citations by respectable people (usually
other professors).

2. Papers in respectable journals are reviewed by professors and
their graduate students. (The more respectable the professor,
the more likely that students will do the reviewing.)

3. Students and professors give high scores to papers that make
incremental improvements to familiar paradigms. Anything outside
a familiar paradigm is likely to get a low score. (A colleague
showed me a rejection note, in which the reviewer wrote "I never
saw anyone do anything like this before." Any research that is
significantly different from other published research is not
considered respectable.)

4. For an associate professor, the primary goal is to get promoted
to full professor. (Copy the comment from point #1.)

5. Full professors are generally in output-only mode. That means
they are not likely to read anything that is not directly related
to getting more funding for their department. And very few funding
agencies give grants for R & D on Peirce's graphs.

As just one more example, some graduate students at Stanford tried
to publish a paper on something called a "page rank" algorithm for
evaluating relevance of information. But that idea was outside any
respectable paradigm, and the students had a little project with
the childish name Google. So of course, the paper was rejected.
Eventually, however, their project made enough money that they had
enough funds to get the attention of full professors. That made
their paradigm respectable. Now, many papers use the term "page
rank" in their titles in order to make them sound respectable.

John

PS: At large conferences such as IJCAI, the most exciting
presentations are in workshops, not in the main sessions, which
are reserved for boring papers that get high scores. The ones
that get "best paper" awards are ones that nobody could find
any excuse for rejecting -- they are invariably the most boring.

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-10T04:45:29Z

Jon,

The answer to that question is obvious:

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
> have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
> imagination that many of us have long believed they ought?

They have caught the imagination of every student who has ever
studied the subject. But the hardest task is to get *professors*
to study anything:

1. For an assistant professor, the primary goal is to get tenure.
That requires not only a long list of publications in reputable
journals, but a list of citations by respectable people (usually
other professors).

2. Papers in respectable journals are reviewed by professors and
their graduate students. (The more respectable the professor,
the more likely that students will do the reviewing.)

3. Students and professors give high scores to papers that make
incremental improvements to familiar paradigms. Anything outside
a familiar paradigm is likely to get a low score. (A colleague
showed me a rejection note, in which the reviewer wrote "I never
saw anyone do anything like this before." Any research that is
significantly different from other published research is not
considered respectable.)

4. For an associate professor, the primary goal is to get promoted
to full professor. (Copy the comment from point #1.)

5. Full professors are generally in output-only mode. That means
they are not likely to read anything that is not directly related
to getting more funding for their department. And very few funding
agencies give grants for R & D on Peirce's graphs.

As just one more example, some graduate students at Stanford tried
to publish a paper on something called a "page rank" algorithm for
evaluating relevance of information. But that idea was outside any
respectable paradigm, and the students had a little project with
the childish name Google. So of course, the paper was rejected.
Eventually, however, their project made enough money that they had
enough funds to get the attention of full professors. That made
their paradigm respectable. Now, many papers use the term "page
rank" in their titles in order to make them sound respectable.

John

PS: At large conferences such as IJCAI, the most exciting
presentations are in workshops, not in the main sessions, which
are reserved for boring papers that get high scores. The ones
that get "best paper" awards are ones that nobody could find
any excuse for rejecting -- they are invariably the most boring.

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Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-09T18:50:16Z

Sorry, I lost track of this thread due to a lot of
"just (barely) in time" home and garden winterizing
that I had to do before the storm that blew in today.

Somewhat disconnectedly, then, one of the things that I often
think of on the pedagogical front is the tenor of discussions
that I've had in some of the classical math discussion forums,
where students tend to focus on their more immediate homework
problems. I notice, a bit sadly, that the run of the mill in
logic education is leaving yet another generation of students
struggling with basic logical hurdles that are wholly trivial
when tackled with the right syntax.

Traveling the next couple of days, but I had to get that off my chest ...

Jon

Re: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.ai.conceptual-graphs/2911

JA: It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
imagination that many of us have long believed they ought?

--

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Dependency Parsing and SQLite

2009-12-09T11:01:06Z

Since tools are being discussed, I'd like to mention some things
that tool developers might find useful. One is a short book on
dependency parsing, which presents a good overview of the subject
and includes pointers to various free software packages that
implement dependency parsers. (See the review below.)

Dependency parsers and link-grammar parsers are useful for
generating graphs that can be mapped almost one-to-one to CGs.
Some tools mentioned in the following book support multiple
languages, and some are specialized for English.

Another is the SQLite database engine, which is open source and
widely used by prominent companies, such as Adobe, Apple, Mozilla,
and Google. It is also bundled with languages such as Python
and PHP. Following is their web site:

http://www.sqlite.org/

And following are some of their famous users:

http://www.sqlite.org/famous.html

Despite its small size, SQLite will support some large files, but
the maximum size of a single file is limited to 320 petabytes.

John Sowa

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [na_members@...] Book Announcement:: Dependency Parsing
Date: Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:00:57 -0500
From: Priscilla Rasmussen <acl@...>
To: na_members@...

BOOK ANNOUNCEMENT

Dependency Parsing

Sandra Kübler (Indiana University)
Ryan McDonald (Google Research)
Joakim Nivre (Uppsala and Växjö Universities)

Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies #2 (Morgan &
Claypool Publishers), 2009, 127 pages

Dependency-based methods for syntactic parsing have become
increasingly popular in natural language processing in recent years.
This book gives a thorough introduction to the methods that are most
widely used today. After an introduction to dependency grammar and
dependency parsing, followed by a formal characterization of the
dependency parsing problem, the book surveys the three major classes
of parsing models that are in current use: transition-based, graph-
based, and grammar-based models. It continues with a chapter on
evaluation and one on the comparison of different methods, and it
closes with a few words on current trends and future prospects of
dependency parsing. The book presupposes a knowledge of basic concepts
in linguistics and computer science, as well as some knowledge of
parsing methods for constituency-based representations.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Dependency Parsing / Transition-
Based Parsing / Graph-Based Parsing / Grammar-Based Parsing /
Evaluation / Comparison / Final Thoughts

http://dx.doi.org/10.2200/S00169ED1V01Y200901HLT002

This title is available online without charge to members of
institutions that that have licensed the Synthesis Digital Library of
Engineering and Computer Science. Members of licensing institutions
have unlimited access to download, save, and print the PDF without
restriction; use of the book as a course text is encouraged. To find
out whether your institution is a subscriber, visit
<http://www.morganclaypool.com/page/licensed
>, or just click on the book's URL above from an institutional IP
address and attempt to download the PDF. Others may purchase the book
from this URL as a PDF download for US$30 or in print for US$40.
Printed copies are also available from Amazon and from booksellers
worldwide at approximately US$40 or local currency equivalent.

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic - As pedagogical and philosofical tools

2009-12-09T10:39:03Z

Alfredo,

That is an excellent reminder:

CSP> "Logic came about for the sake of reasonableness, not
> reasonableness for the sake of logic." Let us never lose sight
> of that truth, forgotten though it is, every day, in every walk
> of life, especially in well-regulated America!
> --Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.195 (c.1902)

And that collection of quotations by CSP is also a good starting
point for anybody who finds his longer papers hard to read:

http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/rsources/quotes/quotes.htm

Another quotation, which is important for the social issues that were
discussed in this thread:

CSP> Knowledge is essentially social
>
> No general description of the mode of advance of human knowledge
> can be just which leaves out of account the social aspect of
> knowledge. That is of its very essence. What a thing society is!
> The workingman, with his trade union, knows that. Men and women
> moving in polite society understand it, still better. But
> Bohemians, like me, whose work is done in solitude, are apt to
> forget that not only is a man as a whole little better than
> a brute in solitude, but also that everything that bears any
> important meaning to him must receive its interpretation from
> social considerations.
> --Charles S. Peirce, MS 1573.273 (undated)

John Sowa

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic - As pedagogical and philosofical tools

2009-12-09T04:10:26Z

Logic is for the sake of reasonableness
"Logic came about for the sake of reasonableness, not reasonableness for the
sake of logic." Let us never lose sight of that truth, forgotten though it
is, every day, in every walk of life, especially in well-regulated America!
--Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers 2.195 (c.1902)
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/rsources/quotes/quotes.htm

TV, Computer,Cell Phones and Software, all they are CG applications.
We need Define CG Functions:
CG.append(Reasonableness.& Logic);.
CG.append(Knowledge & Visibility);.

Alfredo Horoch
Arisbe

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
> have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
> imagination that many of us have long believed it should?

> CG's as a pedagogical tool need to be sustained both by intellectual
> advocacy, and by simple tools.....

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Re: RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

2009-12-08T11:42:28Z

Simon,

As John's thesis supervisor (and a long-time collaborator), I suggest
that you make sure you have his explicit permission to distribute his code.

Pavel

Polovina, Simon wrote:

> If anyone is interested I have John (Heaton)'s and my CARE Prolog code if anyone
> wishes to take it up (either John's on its own or with my code as they would be two
> distinct tasks), provided you acknowledge this previous work as
appropriate.

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RE: RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

2009-12-08T10:58:50Z

Thanks Simon, I'll read the thesis and keep your offer in mind,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Polovina, Simon [mailto:S.Polovina@...]
Sent: Tuesday, December 08, 2009 9:56 AM
To: 'cg@...'
Subject: RE: [CG:] RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

Hi Rich, and all,

I see that Graham has put the thesis on line at his website - thanks!

As John (Sowa) states, it was 15 years too late but didn't exist online in
any shape or form until the British Library recently made it available
(after I'd specifically requested it).

As it happens I also used John (Heaton)'s theorem prover in my own PhD
(www.polovina.me.uk/PhD), building a GUI for it and calling it CARE
(Conceptual Analysis and Review Environment). I used MacProlog which had
excellent graphical libraries but was not 32 bit clean, so like John's it's
been gathering dust...

If anyone is interested I have John (Heaton)'s and my CARE Prolog code if
anyone wishes to take it up (either John's on its own or with my code as
they would be two distinct tasks), provided you acknowledge this previous
work as appropriate.

Cheers,

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Elk [mailto:richcooperelk@...]
Sent: 07 December 2009 18:02
To: cg@...
Subject: [CG:] RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

Hi Simon,

The link below, i.e.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019
doesn't work; it gets me to a site that offers:
theses some day in the future when the site is working,
after I have become a member,
after I have logged in,
and after I have found the thesis you mentioned.

Is there a shorter shortcut?

Thanks,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Polovina, Simon [mailto:S.Polovina@...]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 3:37 AM
To: 'cg@...'
Subject: [CG:] Peirce's graph logic

Hi CGers,

As you know from ICCS year on year I've continually been referring to
Peirce's graph logic in my work, applying it to business applications.

If you are interested in how Peirce's logic can be incorporated with
conceptual graphs (CG) in a lucid, software-implementable way I would
strongly recommend John Heaton's thesis "Goal driven theorem proving using
conceptual graphs and Peirce logic", which can be obtained for free from the
British Library:
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019

This work needs re-promoting as without a software tool that support's
Peirce logic as lucidly as John's, its value will always be undermined as I
have discovered from my own teaching experiences.

Sadly John has moved onto other things so is no longer continuing it,
despite my best efforts to encourage him. Nonetheless I'm hoping that this
fascinating work can be kicked off again and further developed to reach its
potential. Exploring Peirce's visualisation of logic with CG would open up
rich educational and commercial opportunities, once we can bring the
productivity of computers to bear upon it. Feel free to take it up.

Cheers,

Simon

Dr. Simon Polovina, Senior Lecturer in Computing
Conceptual Structures Research Group
Sheffield Hallam University, Furnival Building, 153 Arundel St, Sheffield,
UK S1 2NU
Tel: +44 (0)114 225 6825; Web: www.polovina.me.uk

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-08T10:26:39Z

Bob, Rich, Michel, Janet, and everybody else,

The sociological issues of why some things (both ideas and products)
become popular and others don't are extremely complex. In my previous
note, I mentioned ways to promote any kind of technology: hype, money,
and tools. I should have mentioned an extremely important fourth:
applications. A good "killer app" is the quickest way to make any
technology succeed, but we also need infrastructure to support it.

We also have to recognize that there are many competing views that
have a lot of merit. Different people have different perspectives,
as the parody "verb conjugations" show:

I educate, you advertise, and he hypes.

In my previous note, I called Bertrand Russell a "hype artist",
but many logicians in the early 20th century regarded him as a hero
for promoting symbolic logic in "competition" with the entrenched
Aristotelian syllogisms. Every university from the middle ages to
the early 20th century had taught Aristotelian logic as a required
course for every freshman.

But Aristotle wasn't the competition. The alternative was ignorance.
Russell and other logicians managed to get universities to stop
teaching Aristotle. But they didn't start teaching symbolic logic.
Instead of having 100% of the students taking at least one course in
logic, very few people today take any course in logic. And it shows.

BP> CG's as a pedagogical tool need to be sustained both by intellectual
> advocacy, and by simple tools... "Concept Maps" have succeeded
> because of "Inspiration" and "C-Map".

I agree. I mentioned CMaps in my 1984 book as a useful first step,
and we should encourage people to build tools that help make the
transition from informal CMaps to more formal CGs, EGs, and related
conceptual structures, such as Formal Concept Analysis (FCA).

Other graphic tools such as UML, David Cox's FLIPP charts, and many
other kinds of graphical aids can also be mapped to and from CGs.
An important advantage of CGIF is that it is designed for ease of
mapping to and from graphical notations. CGIF has a formal mapping
to CLIF, but instead of parenthesized trees, the structure of CGIF
is an *unordered* set of *nodes*. That makes it much easier to map
CGIF to and from any kind of graphical notation.

BP> But the aspirations of CG are so fundamental that 5th graders
> may seem an unworthy audience...

There is no such thing as an unworthy audience. If you can get
5th graders to start using CGs and EGs, that would be great. But
developing good tools for children is *harder* than developing good
tools for adults. If anybody has any good ideas, please pursue them.

RC> But I think once our perceptions are wired to early experiences,
> they change only with great difficulty.

Fads in children's toys come and go very quickly, and even the experts
at companies for toys and educational products have many more failures
than success stories. But if anybody has great ideas, pursue them.

MC> please have a look to http://www.lirmm.fr/cogui/
> We are looking forward for your comments.

You and your group deserve a lot of credit for developing the theory
and foundations for an important suite of tools, implementing them,
and using them in a wide range of applications. But we also need
to integrate *all* CG tools with *all* other tools for conceptual
structures (e.g., FCA) and with *all* other tools for knowledge
representation -- e.g., Semantic Web, relational databases, UML
diagrams, etc.

Since 1991, the CS community has been working on standards for
knowledge representation, both in our yearly conferences and
in collaboration with ISO and ANSI groups. We had our yearly
workshops on CGIF at ICCS workshops and discussed every detail
on CG list. Harry Delugach worked very hard in getting CGIF
integrated with the Common Logic standard and seeing it through
to an official ISO/IEC standard.

It was a long hard struggle, but I believe that the CL standard is
an excellent foundation for integrating all KR + DB + SemWeb tools.
That is the primary theme of the following tutorial:

http://www.jfsowa.com/talks/cnl4ss.pdf
Controlled Natural Languages for Semantic Systems

JS> For exposure and funding, what do you think of the prospects for
> EGs and CGs in the foundation for cross-disciplinary communication
> tools in the service science initiative of IBM? As defined by Jim
> Spohrer, the service science field would be a comprehensive science
> of human-made systems.

I think that they would be an excellent foundation. But somebody has
to take the initiative to do the work. We can't just say "Let's you
and him do something." Who is going to volunteer? And actually do it?

JS> My own view is that the foundations of the field will need to
> return to the full breadth and complexity of the ideas of Whitehead
> and Peirce that to this point have been too difficult (or strange)
> for wide adoption.

I would agree. But again, somebody has to do the work. We all have
different talents, interests, and opportunities. We can't just go
to Jim Spohrer or anybody else who may have some influence and say
"Read Whitehead and Peirce." (Actually, we could, but I doubt that
we would get any results.) We need to have a concrete proposal with
some concrete plans that some group with funding would support.

Does anybody have any ideas? And is anybody going to do the work?

John

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RE: RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

2009-12-08T09:56:26Z

Hi Rich, and all,

I see that Graham has put the thesis on line at his website - thanks!

As John (Sowa) states, it was 15 years too late but didn't exist online in any shape or form until the British Library recently made it available (after I'd specifically requested it).

As it happens I also used John (Heaton)'s theorem prover in my own PhD (www.polovina.me.uk/PhD), building a GUI for it and calling it CARE (Conceptual Analysis and Review Environment). I used MacProlog which had excellent graphical libraries but was not 32 bit clean, so like John's it's been gathering dust...

If anyone is interested I have John (Heaton)'s and my CARE Prolog code if anyone wishes to take it up (either John's on its own or with my code as they would be two distinct tasks), provided you acknowledge this previous work as appropriate.

Cheers,

Simon

-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Elk [mailto:richcooperelk@...]
Sent: 07 December 2009 18:02
To: cg@...
Subject: [CG:] RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

Hi Simon,

The link below, i.e.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019
doesn't work; it gets me to a site that offers:
theses some day in the future when the site is working,
after I have become a member,
after I have logged in,
and after I have found the thesis you mentioned.

Is there a shorter shortcut?

Thanks,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Polovina, Simon [mailto:S.Polovina@...]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 3:37 AM
To: 'cg@...'
Subject: [CG:] Peirce's graph logic

Hi CGers,

As you know from ICCS year on year I've continually been referring to
Peirce's graph logic in my work, applying it to business applications.

If you are interested in how Peirce's logic can be incorporated with
conceptual graphs (CG) in a lucid, software-implementable way I would
strongly recommend John Heaton's thesis "Goal driven theorem proving using
conceptual graphs and Peirce logic", which can be obtained for free from the
British Library:
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019

This work needs re-promoting as without a software tool that support's
Peirce logic as lucidly as John's, its value will always be undermined as I
have discovered from my own teaching experiences.

Sadly John has moved onto other things so is no longer continuing it,
despite my best efforts to encourage him. Nonetheless I'm hoping that this
fascinating work can be kicked off again and further developed to reach its
potential. Exploring Peirce's visualisation of logic with CG would open up
rich educational and commercial opportunities, once we can bring the
productivity of computers to bear upon it. Feel free to take it up.

Cheers,

Simon

Dr. Simon Polovina, Senior Lecturer in Computing
Conceptual Structures Research Group
Sheffield Hallam University, Furnival Building, 153 Arundel St, Sheffield,
UK S1 2NU
Tel: +44 (0)114 225 6825; Web: www.polovina.me.uk

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T15:04:27Z

John,

For exposure and funding, what do you think of the prospects for EGs
and CGs in the foundation for cross-disciplinary communication tools
in the service science initiative of IBM? As defined by Jim Spohrer,
the service science field would be a comprehensive science of
human-made systems. My own view is that the foundations of the field
will need to return to the full breadth and complexity of the ideas
of Whitehead and Peirce that to this point have been too difficult
(or strange) for wide adoption.

Janet

>JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
>>have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
>>imagination that many of us have long believed it should?
>
>I agree. As a starting contribution to that discussion, I'd like
>to suggest a few reasons:
>
> 1. Hype. Having a good hype artist to drum up support for any
> kind of scientific or engineering development is essential.
> An example is Bertrand Russell, who hyped Peirce-Peano
> notation for years. He not only succeeded in making it the
> world's most widely used notation for logic, he even got his
> own name attached in front -- despite the fact that he didn't
> add a single symbol or punctuation mark to Peano's version,
> and most of the technical material was written by Whitehead.
>
> 2. Money. I used to call SQL the world's worst notation for logic,
> but RDF and OWL have usurped that title. Part of the reason why
> they are so widely used is hype. But an even larger part is the
> millions of euros that have been dumped on them by Nokia and
> the EU. Thousands of students have been lured into abandoning
> much more fundamental research by the promise of funding and jobs.
> (And I can't really blame the students.)
>
> 3. Tools. The reason why SQL succeeded (and became, in the words
> of Michael Stonebraker, "Intergalactic Dataspeak"), is that it
> was supported by tools that proved to be extremely useful.
> There are some EGs and CGs, but they don't work together. We
> now have an ISO standard for CGIF (a subset of which can also
> be used as EGIF), but there is a lot of work necessary to make
> the tools support smooth interoperability.
>
>SP> John [Heaton] has moved onto other things so is no longer
>> continuing it, despite my best efforts to encourage him.
>
>Actually, I can't blame him. People need a day job that pays
>the rent, and they're not going to get paid for something like
>that until it solves problems that people will pay to get solved.
>The Semantic Web had enough hype behind it that people paid long
>before they saw any results. But without hype or results, it's
>hard to get money.
>
>I also had some other comments about John H's thesis, but I'll
>send them in another note.
>
>John
>
>
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Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T13:26:32Z

Extremism in the pursuit of pragmatism, especially of the shallower sorts,
has a tendency to fall into nominalism and psychologism. For a while at
the turn of the century, James and maybe Dewey had pragmatism confused
with a short-sighted and overly reductionist version of behaviorism,
but I think they later corrected those excesses, Dewey especially.

Jon

--

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Re: Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T13:04:44Z

Jon,

My (rough) understanding is that Peirce's primary objections to the
work of James and Dewey were that they 1) weren't systematic in
approach, and 2) "faded into nominalism." Yet Whitehead, who credits
both James and Dewey as influences in _Process and Reality_ (along
with Henri Bergson), came up with a systematic speculative philosophy
that was far from nominalist.

Following your line of thought, that may be because Whitehead--thanks
to his mathematical training?--had a tolerance for complexity matched
only by Peirce himself.

Janet

>There's empiricism, there's radical empiricism,
>and then there's naive empiricism ... somewhere,
>it's hard to tell when, it fades into nominalism.
>Why it does that is probably due to an excessive
>desire for simplicity. Beware of wiki-phrenology!
>
>Jon
>
>--
>
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Heaton 1994

2009-12-07T13:00:46Z

Having gone to the trouble to register at the British Library's EThOS website so that I could download the thesis Simon Polovina mentioned, I decided to post a copy of the thesis on my own website. It is available at:

grshutt.org/uk_bl_ethos_417019.zip

The file is a 16.3 MB .zip file.

Best,

Graham

Graham R. SHUTT
Voice: 206.726.9491
Email: grshutt@...
URL: grshutt.org

Open Access Publishers [split from Pragmata = Objects?]

2009-12-07T12:42:28Z

Gary and John,

This site has a comprehensive list of publisher copyright and
self-publishing policies:

http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL

I would also appreciate hearing others' thoughts on access and
publishing, an issue that seems to strongly implicate Peirce's "Do
not block the way of inquiry" and "Logic is rooted in the social
principle" (foreshadowing Web 2.0?). Should there be a "pledge"
publicized in honor of Peirce to raise awareness of the connection
between progress in research and sociality outside of the Peirce
community?

Janet

Gary Richmond wrote:
This brings up another topic discussed here some time ago, but for
which I then thought there was no satisfactory answer offered,
namely: Why publish in any other than open source publication when so
many limitations are placed on authors by companies like Routledge?
And not just on authors. Those scholars who are no longer affiliated
with a large research institution may also find it difficult
(expensive) to get access to much scholarly work.

For example, to get permission from Routledge to place a copy (now
removed after a six month free access period) of my article on
Arisbe: The Peirce Gateway site
http://www.cspeirce.com/menu/library/aboutcsp/aboutcsp.htm took at
least a dozen exchanges between the editor of Critical Arts, Keyan
Tomaselli, myself, and several editors at Routledge. It took
additional correspondence for me to get permission to continue to
place (after the six month access period) the article on the Arisbe
site--but *not*, it was stipulated, in its published form, while yet
giving full publication credit to Routledge (I have not yet had time
to do that, but thanks for reminding me that I need to recast the
piece for Arisbe).

Any new thoughts by anyone here on this issue of Open Source publication?

John Sowa wrote:
Re open source publications: Many respectable organizations,
such as the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) put
all their journals and conferences on the WWW for free access.

Many other publishers also include a clause in their contracts
that say authors may place a *preprint* on their web sites.
Those preprints may have the same content as the published
version, but in a different format. Others say that authors
may place a copy on their web site, but only after publication
-- sometimes with a waiting period of a year.

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T12:12:16Z

Jon,
please have a look to http://www.lirmm.fr/cogui/
We are looking forward for your comments.
All the best,
Michel

bobp@... a écrit :

> Jon,
> CG's as a pedagogical tool need to be sustained both by intellectual
> advocacy, and by simple tools. Concepts need to be teachable at some
> entry level, and the CG concept needs to be teachable at a level
> accessible to an elementary school teacher. "Concept Maps" have
> succceeded because of "Inspiration" and "C-Map". "Semantic Networks"
> haven't had an equivalent tool, but "SemNet" made an attempt. If there
> were a tool that allowed a 5th grade teacher to use controlled English to
> construct a CG for her students, I would take it upon myself to promote
> it tirelessly. But the aspirations of CG are so fundamental that 5th
> graders may seem an unworthy audience, even if many adults "aren't
> smarter than a 5th grader", to quote the TV show.
> Bob
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
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--
Michel Chein
Professeur émérite à l'Université de Montpellier 2
Lab. d'Informatique, de Robotique et de Microelectronique de Montpellier (CNRS et UM2)
161 rue Ada F-34392 Montpellier cedex 5

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RE: Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T10:55:39Z

Hi John,

My comments are interspersed below,

-Rich

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

RC> It seems to me that empiricism is returning due to the new

> insights we get from the web, the internet, all the data

> intensive knowledge of the last twenty or thirty years.

John, you wrote:

Scientists have always been strongly empirical. Until the 1960s,

linguists used data driven methods, including statistics and what

they called "grammar discovery procedures." But Chomsky claimed

that data-driven methods were inadequate, and he argued for the

"intuition" of a native speaker as the most authoritative test

for grammaticality.

Though true, my education, when completed, was far stronger mathematically than I had expected when I began it. My orientation is more intuitive I suppose than the typical mathematician's. At that beginning of my education, I considered math to be abstract, and certainly not empirical. It was my own past experiences with physics, electronics and science that made me love EE and hate Chemistry with equal passion. That was my empirical state of mind at the beginning of my college education.

Especially in EE, we had intensive math preparation, which was fun and games, but hardly real, and therefore hardly empirical. It was the intuitions I got from visualizing mathematical structures against simple real systems I had experienced that helped me formulate the critical set of EE concepts necessary for understanding the genre. Everything else built on top of these:

System ::= <nodes, edges, through variables, across variables>

which constitute the complexity of electronic circuits, field theories, and all the lovely constructs of engineering. Not just a single experience is encoded in a System, but a whole field of experiences. The fields are ordered by the logic of known properties of the problem space. So putting together a solution system against a set of design specifications is a simple matter. It’s a process of solving a jigsaw puzzle (specifications) by plugging in the available parts (slices) and can be automated.

So it is the applying of experience to math which I view (intuitively) as "empirical". Do you agree?

Experiences understood in a framework => Understanding

I suppose the above phrase is my view of empirical processes at work.

Following is what Peirce wrote in 1883:

CSP> The other physical sciences are the results of inquiry based

> on guesses suggested by the ideas of mechanics. The moral sciences,

> so far as they can be called sciences, are equally developed out

> of our instinctive ideas about human nature. Man has thus far not

> attained to any knowledge that is not in a wide sense either

> mechanical or anthropological in its nature, and it may be

> reasonably presumed that he never will.

Wisdom beyond his civilization!

> Side by side, then, with the well established proposition that

> all knowledge is based on experience, and that science is only

> advanced by the experimental verifications of theories, we have

> to place this other equally important truth, that all human

> knowledge, up to the highest flights of science, is but the

> development of our inborn animal instincts.

A sentiment also held up by evolutionary theorists since then, IMHO. Also, Popper would agree with this viewpoint in my opinion. We seem to only be able to divert our instincts by small fractions of their potential range, and even then only with great practice.

But how does this translate into the meaning of the word “empirical”? I get so many conflicting answers from people about what the word REALLY means.

This is from p. 181 of _Studies in Logic_ by Members of the

Johns Hopkins Univeristy, edited by C. S. Peirce,

Little, Brown, & Co., Boston, 1883.

John Sowa

Thanks for the Peirce quotes; you always enliven and teach.

Thanks,

-Rich

RE: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T10:33:35Z

Jon and Bob,

Yes, as a pedagogical tool, CGs might be excellent for teaching kids and
young adults to think in logical terms so that they can imagine solutions to
their problems in more familiar ways. But I think once our perceptions are
wired to early experiences, they change only with great difficulty.

JMHO,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: bobp@... [mailto:bobp@...]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 10:19 AM
To: cg@...
Subject: Re: [CG:] Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

Jon,
CG's as a pedagogical tool need to be sustained both by intellectual
advocacy, and by simple tools. Concepts need to be teachable at some
entry level, and the CG concept needs to be teachable at a level
accessible to an elementary school teacher. "Concept Maps" have
succceeded because of "Inspiration" and "C-Map". "Semantic Networks"
haven't had an equivalent tool, but "SemNet" made an attempt. If there
were a tool that allowed a 5th grade teacher to use controlled English to
construct a CG for her students, I would take it upon myself to promote
it tirelessly. But the aspirations of CG are so fundamental that 5th
graders may seem an unworthy audience, even if many adults "aren't
smarter than a 5th grader", to quote the TV show.
Bob

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T10:18:41Z

Jon,
CG's as a pedagogical tool need to be sustained both by intellectual
advocacy, and by simple tools. Concepts need to be teachable at some
entry level, and the CG concept needs to be teachable at a level
accessible to an elementary school teacher. "Concept Maps" have
succceeded because of "Inspiration" and "C-Map". "Semantic Networks"
haven't had an equivalent tool, but "SemNet" made an attempt. If there
were a tool that allowed a 5th grade teacher to use controlled English to
construct a CG for her students, I would take it upon myself to promote
it tirelessly. But the aspirations of CG are so fundamental that 5th
graders may seem an unworthy audience, even if many adults "aren't
smarter than a 5th grader", to quote the TV show.
Bob

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RE: ] Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T10:10:24Z

Jon,

Agreed, the desire to project simplicity is a force majeur in human motivations, at least in mine; the others are on their own.

And later you posted:

It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical imagination that many of us have long believed it should?

Jon

I think that part is easy: CGs demand that the user function in CG defined ways, with CG defined objects, etc, without using his intuition or her problem knowledge.

It’s the same mismatch as the old rule based systems that were supposed to take over the world in the 80's, 90's, 00's and soon the 10's. People, for good reason, express an intense desire for THEIR OWN simplicity in their actions and choices, and CGs simplify into logic, not into the problem space. People simplify into their own subjective toolbox to find ways and means for addressing problems that motivate them, not the logic of it, which doesn't motivate them. They are up to their portals in alligators, and not concerned with the environmental status of the swamp at the moment.

JMHO,

-Rich

Sincerely,

Rich Cooper

EnglishLogicKernel.com

Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Jon Awbrey [mailto:jawbrey@...]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 5:00 AM
To: cg@...
Cc: Arisbe List; Inquiry List
Subject: [CG:] Re: Pragmata = Objects?

There's empiricism, there's radical empiricism,

and then there's naive empiricism ... somewhere,

it's hard to tell when, it fades into nominalism.

Why it does that is probably due to an excessive

desire for simplicity. Beware of wiki-phrenology!

Jon

inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/

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RE: ] Peirce's graph logic

2009-12-07T10:01:43Z

Hi Simon,

The link below, i.e.
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019
doesn't work; it gets me to a site that offers:
theses some day in the future when the site is working,
after I have become a member,
after I have logged in,
and after I have found the thesis you mentioned.

Is there a shorter shortcut?

Thanks,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Polovina, Simon [mailto:S.Polovina@...]
Sent: Monday, December 07, 2009 3:37 AM
To: 'cg@...'
Subject: [CG:] Peirce's graph logic

Hi CGers,

As you know from ICCS year on year I've continually been referring to
Peirce's graph logic in my work, applying it to business applications.

If you are interested in how Peirce's logic can be incorporated with
conceptual graphs (CG) in a lucid, software-implementable way I would
strongly recommend John Heaton's thesis "Goal driven theorem proving using
conceptual graphs and Peirce logic", which can be obtained for free from the
British Library:
http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019

This work needs re-promoting as without a software tool that support's
Peirce logic as lucidly as John's, its value will always be undermined as I
have discovered from my own teaching experiences.

Sadly John has moved onto other things so is no longer continuing it,
despite my best efforts to encourage him. Nonetheless I'm hoping that this
fascinating work can be kicked off again and further developed to reach its
potential. Exploring Peirce's visualisation of logic with CG would open up
rich educational and commercial opportunities, once we can bring the
productivity of computers to bear upon it. Feel free to take it up.

Cheers,

Simon

Dr. Simon Polovina, Senior Lecturer in Computing
Conceptual Structures Research Group
Sheffield Hallam University, Furnival Building, 153 Arundel St, Sheffield,
UK S1 2NU
Tel: +44 (0)114 225 6825; Web: www.polovina.me.uk

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Re: Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T06:35:45Z

Simon and Jon,

SP> If you are interested in how Peirce's logic can be incorporated
> with conceptual graphs (CG) in a lucid, software-implementable way
> I would strongly recommend John Heaton's thesis "Goal driven theorem
> proving using conceptual graphs and Peirce logic", which can be
> obtained for free from the British Library:
> http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.41701

Thanks for posting this notice to CG list. And I would like to urge
everybody else who has written anything related to the themes of this
list to please post a notice (and URL) to CG list. I have been urging
people to do that for years, but very few do. This dissertation was
written in 1994, and it's 15 years late.

Note to Heather: I think that we should gather as many dissertations
and other publications on CGs as we can find (and get permission for)
and put them on conceptualgraphs.org. We should also put FCA and
other related publications on conceptualstructures.org

The thesis by John Heaton, for example, requires a lengthy registration
process, which is a nuisance. It would be much better to have it
available for a one-click download on conceptualgraphs.org

JA> It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
> have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
> imagination that many of us have long believed it should?

I agree. As a starting contribution to that discussion, I'd like
to suggest a few reasons:

1. Hype. Having a good hype artist to drum up support for any
kind of scientific or engineering development is essential.
An example is Bertrand Russell, who hyped Peirce-Peano
notation for years. He not only succeeded in making it the
world's most widely used notation for logic, he even got his
own name attached in front -- despite the fact that he didn't
add a single symbol or punctuation mark to Peano's version,
and most of the technical material was written by Whitehead.

2. Money. I used to call SQL the world's worst notation for logic,
but RDF and OWL have usurped that title. Part of the reason why
they are so widely used is hype. But an even larger part is the
millions of euros that have been dumped on them by Nokia and
the EU. Thousands of students have been lured into abandoning
much more fundamental research by the promise of funding and jobs.
(And I can't really blame the students.)

3. Tools. The reason why SQL succeeded (and became, in the words
of Michael Stonebraker, "Intergalactic Dataspeak"), is that it
was supported by tools that proved to be extremely useful.
There are some EGs and CGs, but they don't work together. We
now have an ISO standard for CGIF (a subset of which can also
be used as EGIF), but there is a lot of work necessary to make
the tools support smooth interoperability.

SP> John [Heaton] has moved onto other things so is no longer
> continuing it, despite my best efforts to encourage him.

Actually, I can't blame him. People need a day job that pays
the rent, and they're not going to get paid for something like
that until it solves problems that people will pay to get solved.
The Semantic Web had enough hype behind it that people paid long
before they saw any results. But without hype or results, it's
hard to get money.

I also had some other comments about John H's thesis, but I'll
send them in another note.

John

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Re: Peirce's Graphical Logic

2009-12-07T05:04:22Z

It might be time to examine why Peirce's logical graphs
have failed to capture the pedagogical and philosophical
imagination that many of us have long believed it should?

Jon

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Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T05:00:28Z

There's empiricism, there's radical empiricism,
and then there's naive empiricism ... somewhere,
it's hard to tell when, it fades into nominalism.
Why it does that is probably due to an excessive
desire for simplicity. Beware of wiki-phrenology!

Jon

--

inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
knol: http://knol.google.com/k/-/-/3fkwvf69kridz/1
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Peirce's graph logic

2009-12-07T03:37:24Z

Hi CGers,

As you know from ICCS year on year I've continually been referring to Peirce's graph logic in my work, applying it to business applications.

If you are interested in how Peirce's logic can be incorporated with conceptual graphs (CG) in a lucid, software-implementable way I would strongly recommend John Heaton's thesis "Goal driven theorem proving using conceptual graphs and Peirce logic", which can be obtained for free from the British Library: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?did=1&uin=uk.bl.ethos.417019

This work needs re-promoting as without a software tool that support's Peirce logic as lucidly as John's, its value will always be undermined as I have discovered from my own teaching experiences.

Sadly John has moved onto other things so is no longer continuing it, despite my best efforts to encourage him. Nonetheless I'm hoping that this fascinating work can be kicked off again and further developed to reach its potential. Exploring Peirce's visualisation of logic with CG would open up rich educational and commercial opportunities, once we can bring the productivity of computers to bear upon it. Feel free to take it up.

Cheers,

Simon

Dr. Simon Polovina, Senior Lecturer in Computing
Conceptual Structures Research Group
Sheffield Hallam University, Furnival Building, 153 Arundel St, Sheffield, UK S1 2NU
Tel: +44 (0)114 225 6825; Web: www.polovina.me.uk

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Re: Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-07T00:41:14Z

Gary and Rich,

Re open source publications: Many respectable organizations,
such as the ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) put
all their journals and conferences on the WWW for free access.

Many other publishers also include a clause in their contracts
that say authors may place a *preprint* on their web sites.
Those preprints may have the same content as the published
version, but in a different format. Others say that authors
may place a copy on their web site, but only after publication
-- sometimes with a waiting period of a year.

RC> It seems to me that empiricism is returning due to the new
> insights we get from the web, the internet, all the data
> intensive knowledge of the last twenty or thirty years.

Scientists have always been strongly empirical. Until the 1960s,
linguists used data driven methods, including statistics and what
they called "grammar discovery procedures." But Chomsky claimed
that data-driven methods were inadequate, and he argued for the
"intuition" of a native speaker as the most authoritative test
for grammaticality.

Following is what Peirce wrote in 1883:

CSP> The other physical sciences are the results of inquiry based
> on guesses suggested by the ideas of mechanics. The moral sciences,
> so far as they can be called sciences, are equally developed out
> of our instinctive ideas about human nature. Man has thus far not
> attained to any knowledge that is not in a wide sense either
> mechanical or anthropological in its nature, and it may be
> reasonably presumed that he never will.
>
> Side by side, then, with the well established proposition that
> all knowledge is based on experience, and that science is only
> advanced by the experimental verifications of theories, we have
> to place this other equally important truth, that all human
> knowledge, up to the highest flights of science, is but the
> development of our inborn animal instincts.

This is from p. 181 of _Studies in Logic_ by Members of the
Johns Hopkins Univeristy, edited by C. S. Peirce,
Little, Brown, & Co., Boston, 1883.

John Sowa

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RE: Re: Pragmata = Objects?

2009-12-06T21:00:25Z

RE: [CG:] Re: Pragmata = Objects?

Rich,

I know little about William James, but here's something on the topic of his "radical empiricism":

[James] was convinced rather early in his life that so-called scientific empiricism was not sufficiently empirical. Why limit the analysis of experience to sense-data? What about memory, and the vague feeling of "something there" which underlies sensation? What about the feelings of relations and the feelings of worth, intentionality, and responsibility? And what about mystical experiences, hallucinations, drug-induced trances, and what James called the "fringes" of experience, which surround normal waking consciousness? What is given in experience greatly exceeds what is given through the senses. Why limit oneself to sensation? If empiricism is to be radical, it must take, as James put it in 1903, "the concrete data of experience in their full completeness. The only fully complete data are, however, the successive moments of our own several histories, taken with their 'objective' deliverance of 'content.'" The content of human experience, the only sort of experience available to humans, is much, much more than sensations.

Marcus P. Ford on James, in _Founders of Constructive Postmodern Philosophy: Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne_, ed. D.R. Griffin (1993), quoting W. James, _Collected Essays and Reviews_ (1920), p.93.

I agree with your sense of the trend.

Janet

Janet,

Please describe the "radical empiricism" concept you attributed to William
James' passing on to Whitehead; the term ("radical empiricism") sounds very
interesting as a comparison to the formality of representation (mathematical
ontology) so prevalent prior to the emergence of huge databases.

It seems to me that empiricism is returning due to the new insights we get
from the web, the internet, all the data intensive knowledge of the last
twenty or thirty years. "Radical empiricism" (whatever it means) must be
based on evidence, and data is evidence of SOMETHING, though we may never
know entirely what empirical data can show us.

Thanks,
-Rich

Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com

-----Original Message-----
From: Janet Singer [mailto:jsinger@...]
Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 10:52 PM
To: cg@...
Subject: Re: [CG:] Re: Pragmata = Objects?

Gary,

Thanks for the references. Peirce's emphasis on continuity is an
interesting contrast with (complement to?) Whitehead's relational
atomism.

My understanding is that Whitehead did not directly read Peirce's
work until late in his life, but developed many similar ideas
independently after being inspired by William James to systematically
explore the implications of James's "radical empiricism". Presumably
James would have communicated some elements of Peirce's views to
Whitehead. Are the details of these interactions known?

Best,
Janet

>Janet,
>
>Thanks for the Whitehead quotation which I think is just to the
>point. It would seem that while some distinctions need to be made
>for the purpose of certain sorts of analysis, rigidity is surely to
>be avoided. This rather nicely connects with Peirce's principle of
>fallibility:
>
>"For years [---] I used for myself to collect my ideas under the
>designation fallibilism; and indeed the first step toward finding
>out is to acknowledge you do not satisfactorily know already; so
>that no blight can so surely arrest all intellectual growth as the
>blight of cocksureness; and ninety-nine out of every hundred good
>heads are reduced to impotence by that malady -- of whose inroads
>they are most strangely unaware!
> Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high
>faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find
>things out, all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow. . .
>." (A Fragment, CP 1.13-14, c. 1897)
>
>And to take this yet a step further, Peirce connects fallibilism and
>continuity!
>
>"The principle of continuity is the idea of fallibilism objectified.

>For fallibilism is the doctrine that our knowledge is never absolute
>but always swims, as it were, in a continuum of uncertainty and of

>indeterminacy. Now the doctrine of continuity is that all things so

>swim in continua." (Untitled Ms., CP 1.171, c. 1897)

>

>Best,

>

>Gary

>>
>>    Pardon this late contribution to the discussion by a
>>    lurker, but John Sowa's point;
>>
>>      [R-W Mann] suggests that the sharp distinction
>>      between processes and things was invented by
>>      Aristotle, and it's a mistake to talk about it as
>>      an inevitable "common sense" view.
>>
>>    reminded me of this wisdom from Whitehead on
>>    Aristotle and rigid distinctions:
>>
>>      It is rigid dogma that destroys truth; and, please
>>      notice, my emphasis is not on the dogma, but on
>>      the rigidity. When men say of any question, 'This
>>      is all there is to be known or said of the
>>      subject; investigation ends here,' that is death.
>>      It may be that the mischief comes not from the
>>      thinker but for the use made of his thinking by
>>      late-comers. Aristotle, for example, gave us out
>>      scientific technique ... yet his logical
>>      propositions, his instruction in sound reasoning
>>      which was bequeathed to Europe, are valid only
>>      within the limited framework of formal logic, and,
>>      as used in Europe, they stultified the minds of
>>      whole generations of medieval Schoolmen. Aristotle
>>      invented science, but destroyed philosophy.
>>
>>      (from Dialogues of Alfred North Whitehead, as
>>      recorded by Lucien Price, p.165, with thanks to
>>
>>http://www.todayinsci.com/QuotationsCategories/R_Cat/Rigidity-Quotations.h
tm)
>>
>>    Thanks for the interesting discussion,
>>    Janet Singer
>
>Gary Richmond
>Philosophy and Critical Thinking
>Speech Communication
>Humanities Department
>LaGuardia College
>City University of New York
>
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