🚀 go-pugleaf

mark@adler.philosophie.uni-stuttgart.de (Mark Johnson) writes:


>What's worrying me is this: if we use a DCG grammar to
>define a relation means/2 true of a string of English words
>and some representation of its meaning (say, an encoding of
>a first-order formula), we can prove things like the
>following:

>  S=[i,saw,a,man,with,a,telescope], means(S,M1), means(S,M2).

>where M1 represents a meaning where where the man has a telescope,
>and M2 represents a meaning where the seeing is done with the
>telescope.

>That is, from our axioms we can prove that S means M1 *and* S means M2.
>The problem is that in the real world it *doesn't*: the English sentence
>S means M1 *or* M2.


It seems to me the DCG system has got the facts right: it's true that
S means M1, and it's true that S means M2. What's missing is the
distinction between sentence and use of a sentence.

Even though (S means M1 and S means M2), on any particular occasion
of use where S is uttered by A, it's not true that (A means-to-convey M1
AND A means-to-convey M2); rather, (A means-to-convey M1 OR A m-to-c M2).

So you need some way of distinguishing sentence type and sentence token.