Conceptual Structures: Information Processing in Mind and Machine

by John F. Sowa

BOOK

Genres: Science, Technical

481 pages, Hardcover

First published July 15, 1983

Reviews

[Jaszmina · Rating 5 out of 5]

The beginnings:
“Aristotle was the founder of cognitive science: all the work on representing knowledge for the past 2300 years can be viewed as an application, refinement, extension, or re-invention of something that Aristotle either developed in detail or mentioned in passing. Leibnitz was the first proponent of artificial intelligence. With his Characteristica Universalis, he attempted to quantify all knowledge and reasoning.”
The rest is partly in this book and partly in the future.

[S]

I wanted to add a note here about the availability online of an appendix of this book (provided by the author): http://www.jfsowa.com/logic/math.htm It's an introduction to reading formal languages (first-order logical languages), which is really not as evil or difficult as it looks at first blush. It's really just saying the meaning of the symbols out loud in your head until it becomes intuitive, which really does save time if you're trying to be as absolutely clear as is possible for a human to be in writing about a very specific thing.

I've started my MA in Library Science and am specializing in Knowledge Management. And, as my friends know, I've had an ongoing interest in ontology. Computer science, as it turns out, is where ontology is applied.

I have been struggling to find an updated version of Sr. Miriam Joseph's coherent account of knowledge in The Trivium. The closest I've come to lately is Berry Smith's BFO. He even says that what he was trying to work out is a contemporary organon.