|{.f|. on Sat, 4 Aug 2001 00:02:52 +0200 (CEST) |
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[Nettime-bold] CYC |
About CYC: http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0109/cover.html ----------- <...> After a bit of forensic work, Klein found the problem. The Cyclists hadn't completely distinguished the concepts of bronze and statue. Cyc had been told that bronze was a material that retained its essential property—its "bronzeness," as it were—no matter what state it was in, solid or liquid. But now Cyc was trying to apply that fact to the statue aspect of "bronze statue." Cyc hadn't been told anything about statues that would invalidate its conclusion; nobody had ever thought it necessary to tell Cyc, for example, that statues are only statues if they're more or less in their original form. It's common sense, sure—but who would bother to meditate on it? "Trying to think of everything," Klein quips, "is quite daunting." This is the chief problem that all Cyclists face: Commonsense knowledge is invisible. It's defined as much by what we don't say as by what we do say. Common knowledge is what we assume everyone has, because it's, well, obvious. This is precisely what makes commonsense knowledge so powerful as an intellectual tool—but it's also what makes it so hard to identify and codify. <...> _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold