Re: [port-peer-review] reviews
Dear Phillipe, (01)
Let me react on two comments of your report. (02)
> Miscellaneous.
> ...
> the author says an ideal language would allow everything to be
> viewed as an argument and permit everything to be
> recognized as an argument. Well, LISP permits about
> everything to be used as an argument, even code itself, and
> what developers may be able to program to "recognize"
> arguments seems more limited by their time and abilities than
> the language itself. What more abstract representational
> function is not and cannot be covered using LISP-like
> syntaxes? I am likely to be on the wrong track. (03)
The problem of LISP and the formal approach to knowledge
representation (KR) in general, lies in its formal nature. Here,
`formal' is used here in the sense of `non-pragmatical'. In my
opinion, LISP is not suitable for KR, because the concepts of LISP
are not directly related to the concepts of human cognition.
That we, humans, do not suffer from the problems of LISP, for
example, proves that natural language possesses `something' that
a formal language does not (or at least, not directly). (04)
> the author argues that human KR is based on signs.
> What's the alternative? If symbols are signs, every language
> (every symbolic representation means) is based on signs. (05)
There are many alternatives. For example, a language symbol can be
considered a string, the syntactic meaning of a sentence a tree etc.
The important point here is that, contrary to a string or a tree,
a sign is not some `thing'. Signs are inherently dynamic and precisely
this makes them suitable for knowledge representation. (06)
Best regards,
Janos (07)