Semantics and Mentography
A picture is worth a thousand words.
| A picture of Mt. Raineer (figure 1) |
Above you see a picture of a mountain. I am pointing at that
mountain by sending you this picture. I wish that my picture
will represent to you the real mountain in the state of Washington at the
North West corner of the United States where I live. I use the picture
here only because it is impossible for me to put the real mountain on this
page and point to it. Believe me, if I could, I would. We in the
state of Washington call that real mountain that you see a picture of
here, "Mt. Raineer". Hopefully now you will let me use the words
"Mt. Raineer" to point to that real mountain instead of always uing the
picture. And with you cooperation we can agree that we have
named that mountain.
Well this might be a bit confusing, so let me see if I can draw you
a picture of what I mean:
| A picture of a head with a small picture of Mt. Raineer and an arrow
pointing out of the head to a picrture of the real mountain and the word
"Mt Raineer" with a similar arrow. (figure 2) |
Again with your cooperation, the diagram of the head in figure 2 respresents
your real head and what is contained within it's outline represents the
contents of your mind. You can plainly see that I have put the "real"
Mt Raineer outside of you head because I am quite sure it won't fit inside
of it. But I have also put a small picuture of the mountain inside
your head because I suspect that you have such an image there in the memory
of your mind. Obviously those two pictures represent quite different
things in my diagram. That difference has been the topic of
centuries of philosophical debate and is quite interesting but is outside
the scope of this paper. For my purposes here I merely
want to establish that my picture (my representation of Mt Raineer) points
to a diffeent thing when it is contained within the outline that I use
to represent the confines of you mind, than when it is outside that outline.
The former being private to you and the latter being public and something
big and tall that even I could fall off of. We have agreed
upon a name that works as well as the picture, so I have put that in parallel
in the diagram.
With your indulgance I would like to further develop this diagraming
method of talking about things where we can draw a circle around a representation
and by doing so portray representations of representations accuratly and
without ambiguity. Let me call this diagraming method mentography
and define it as the graphical representation of mind. This diagramming
method is not substantually different in purpose or in method from the
Conceptual Graphs developed by John F. Sowa [1] or the RDF
model developed by the W3C [2]. All these graphic models and
the mentography introduced in this paper can mathematically represented
by labeled directed graphs [3].
I have drawn arrows between the images indicating that the one image
represents the other. That is the smaller image of the mountain stands
within your mind representing the real mountain outside your mind.
We will always use arrows in our mentographs to represent such relationships
between things. Since there are many diffeent types of relationships
we label always label our arrows with the their relationship type.
now if you have been following my style you should be screaming that
i cannot possibly draw those arrows in aqny real way except perhaps in
a sureal diagram like the one above.
[1] http://www.bestweb.net/~sowa/cg/
[2] http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-rdf-syntax/#model
[3] http://robustAi.net/ai/graph1.htm