From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/5781 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Dusko Pavlovic Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: autonomous terminology: WAS: bilax monoidal functors Date: Tue, 11 May 2010 23:04:58 +0100 (BST) Message-ID: Reply-To: Dusko Pavlovic NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1273625355 15448 80.91.229.12 (12 May 2010 00:49:15 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Wed, 12 May 2010 00:49:15 +0000 (UTC) To: categories@mta.ca Original-X-From: categories@mta.ca Wed May 12 02:49:14 2010 connect(): No such file or directory Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from mailserv.mta.ca ([138.73.1.1]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1OC08M-0000uJ-16 for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Wed, 12 May 2010 02:49:10 +0200 Original-Received: from Majordom by mailserv.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.61) (envelope-from ) id 1OBzij-0007ZT-HO for categories-list@mta.ca; Tue, 11 May 2010 21:22:41 -0300 Original-Sender: categories@mta.ca Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:5781 Archived-At: thanks for the suggestions about the autonomous terminology. i think i got an idea for a minimally invasive solution. we probably shouldn't go too deep into the general questions, but colin mclarty's cryptic comment is very interesting to me, and it seems to strike at the heart of some matters of interest. On May 9, 2010, at 3:41 PM, Colin McLarty wrote: > Dusko Pavlovic Asks > >> is there any reason why words should be taken seriously? > > That just depends on whether or not you want to be understood by > people who do not already know everything you are going to say. there are at least two ways to interpret this. 1) "you can only say something new if you declare what your words mean. otherwise, people will interpret them in their own way, and understand only what they already know." --- this is what my sociology teacher would say. 2) "you can only say something new if you contribute to the evolution of language. otherwise, everything you say are just words that people already know, mostly in combinations that they already tried." --- this is what my poetry teacher would say. i am not sure whether you meant (1) or (2), colin. maybe you tried to say something that i don't know already :) in any case, i suspect that many people here would tend to disagree with my poetry teacher. but the distinction between (1) and (2) stretches beyond my high school teachers. eg, hilbert would surely subscribe something like (1). all those monolithic foundations and logics and set theories can be viewed as efforts to clearly define the words that we use in math. categories, on the other hand, were proposed as a tool for the *working* mathematician. people cared that category theory was a dynamic language, with its philosophical roots in *dialectics*... not that we didn't define our terminology; but categorical work was more about capturing conceptual flows by adjunctions, and the flows of equations by arrows, than about carving words in stone. nowadays, the distinction between (1) and (2) has become very concrete. language is processed on the web, and the problem that the meaning of data is not clearly defined or structured has became a technical problem. two strategies were proposed: 1) semantic web: let us standardize ontologies, anotate data syntactically, and contribute them to the global library; 2) search: follow the hyperlinks and extract the meaning of data dynamically, by analyzing their distribution on the network. eg, if one web site links to another web site, then it lends it some of its reputation, and some of its meaning. paradigm (1) has generated a lot of interesting research. people defined very precise very carefully classified families of terms in very large ontologies. recently, some of them were even populated by data. paradigm (2) works. it changed every science, and made possible a couple of new ones. if there is a question of terminology, ask google. show me 200 papers about motivic cohomology, sorted by popularity. what is motivic cohomology? long live dialectics. things shouldn't be taken seriously only because of a shortage of humor in the world. all the best, -- dusko [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]