From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2003 - 16:43:29 MDT
On Tue, 2003-10-07 at 13:25, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> I'm not sure that is relevant to the question of whether linguistic
> representations of the real world could ever be unambiguous.
Indeed.
It seems obvious to me that an unambiguous linguistic representation
would be prohibitively large, since it would have to have roughly the
same complexity as the concepts being represented (Incompleteness
theorem?). Nor is it clear to me that there can be any non-trivial case
where two people could communicate unambiguously. Even if you had a
perfectly unambiguous linguistic model in your brain, there is no reason
to assume that your internal mapping is identical to the internal
mapping of the person you communicate with, nor would the models be
synchronized.
I'd argue that you can't unambiguously represent a larger system in a
smaller system (size meaning Kolmogorov complexity). Differences in
approximations of the real world between agents will pretty much HAVE to
create ambiguities in communication between agents.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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