[Corpora-List] ANC, FROWN, Fuzzy Logic

[John F. Sowa]

Rob,

I'm happy that we can conclude on a note of agreement:

JFS>> I don't know what hint you're suggesting.  That no rule-based
 >> system can ever be complete?  I think that's obvious.

RF> I'm glad you see this, John. It is the point I was trying to make.

But I would soften the following claim by replacing "should" with
"might":

RF> Chaitin's work helps us understand why it should be so.

Chomsky's fallacy was to take a mathematical formalism, namely
Post production systems, and make the claim that they capture
the fundamental nature of natural language.  If he had softened
that claim to saying they were a promising model of an important
aspect of language, he and his colleagues could have done the
same research, but without inciting the religious wars.

I don't believe that we should take another formalism, such
as Chaitin's or Kolmogorov's, and fall into a similar fallacy
of claiming that they explain the nature of NLs.  Claiming
that those formalisms serve as a stimulating analogy is OK.
But I would change either or both occurrences of "is" to
"may be" in the following sentence:

RF> This is because natural language text is at some level
 > Kolmogorov complex.

John