Elementary Principles for Representing Knowledge
Peter Jaenecke · KNOWLEDGE ORGANIZATION · 1996
laenecke, P. :Elementary principles for Representing Knowl edge Know!.Org.23( 1996)No.2,p.88•l 02, 30 refs.The vast majority of publications in language theory and philosophy start with the language as the given and ask about their structures, about the meaning oftbcir words and about the correct interpretation of tcxts.This paper approaches the language problem from just the opposite side: the given is here a certain content; what is sought for, is an appropriate artificial language to represent this content.To this end, seven elemen tary representation principles arc proposed.To illustrate the way they work, syntactic pattern recognition is introduced as a simple, but non-trivial example for representing knowledge in formal language.Another central thema of the paper is LEIBNIZ's charactcristica universal is and the so-called LElBNIZ project.LElBNIZ's investigations in this field are reviewed against the background of the tasks required in syntactic pattern recognition.It is demonstrated that LEIBNIZ had, in fa ct, already worked with six of the seven representation principles proposed, fu rther, that his eharacteristica universalis is an early form ofa fo rmal language, and lastly, that -contrary to the prevailing view -the LEIBNIZ project is not a matter of logic but rather one of knowledge representation, a field largely unexploited in today's logic-oriented epistemology and phi losophy of science.It is precisely this one-sided orientation of these disciplines, which is rcsponsible for the distorted picture ofLEIBNIZ's work found in the literature; some typical misun derstandings arc finally discussed.