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Re: [ba-unrev-talk] Icons for IBIS


At 09:37 PM 4/11/2002 +0100, Peter Jones wrote:
>E.g. the assumption, "All men are created equal", holds different value
>in an egalitarian
>worldview from one with a strong caste system.    (01)

Thanks for the clarification, Peter.  I see what you're after.    (02)

I think my take is that statements like "All men are created equal" have a 
rich historical context, and as you point out will mean different things in 
different cultures and historical settings.  My experience with formal 
logical systems, where statements have truth values, is that they fail to 
be rich enough to accommodate the layers of communication occurring in 
sense making and meaning negotiation situations ... i.e. when people are 
invoking assumptions like "All men are created equal."  As a result, my 
experience with attempts to use IBIS as if it were a kind of argumentation 
predicate logic (or fuzzy logic) is that you can apply it to logically 
tractable problems (Rittel called them "tame" problems) or to real problems 
(Rittel called these "wicked"), but these are two very different 
applications, and it's important to be clear which exercise you're doing.    (03)

We made a lot of attempts to build logic checkers and other neat 
logic-oriented stuff at MCC in the late 80's but it was never very 
satisfying to me.  As long as the statements inside an argument node are 
unconstrained natural language narratives, the "formal" link or node type 
you apply is really just icing for the people who are reading the map -- 
they'll form their own cognitive links as they interpret the texts in the 
nodes, and hopefully the explicit link semantics won't confuse them or get 
in the way too much.  I may sound cynical here, but I am feeling a hard won 
passion about putting human communication before computable 
structures.   This feels like an incomplete thought but it's late and ... 
maybe it's close enough.    (04)

Jeff    (05)