Version 2 (modified by jbourne, 16 years ago)

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POSC-Caesar FIATECH IDS-ADI Projects

Intelligent Data Sets Accelerating Deployment of ISO15926

Realizing Open Information Interoperability


Thought and Language

Humans are not logical, humans think by making generalizations about observable patterns, and such generalizations need not be comprehensive; that is to say it is implicit that the generalizations are not intended to necessarily cover all cases.

Frequently, this means that humans hold to lore that while useful, might not be correct. But its usefulness extends beyond its value as an approximation, or a rule of thumb: it is useful because human languages makes it concise to communicate to other humans.

Generalization and Analogy

Fundamentally, patterns and generalizations are concise to communicate in human language because human language is based on the same principles - generalizations and analogies that are not intended to be either comprehensive in scope, or literal in application. For example:

"The apple doesn't fall far from the tree ..."

Humans will accept exceptions to rules, while maintaining that the rule still holds worth:

"... but he was definitely the black sheep of the family."

The same flexibility exists in all human languages and in almost all disciplines, short of some mathematics and philosophy - purely abstract universes that do not deal with the real world.

Even physics, chemistry and especially biology and linguistics have shorthands that are universally used in spite of being rife with exceptions and addenda: newtonian physics and thermodynamics were the building blocks of 19th century engineering, and yet they only apply well within particular limitations of scale - demonstrably they are not useless, but neither are they "right".


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