>>[Sean McGrath]>[Simon St. Laurent] >How does "perpetually renegotiable" compare to probabilistic? >That's another key piece of human conversation I'm bringing to this story. Yes. For the probabilistic parts, Sausserre. For the "perpetually renogotiable" parts, John Searle's concepts of Social Reality and the difference between what he calls "brute facts" and "institutional facts": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Searle#Social_reality Meaning is not something that is "out there", ready to be bound into our content. As content moves between producers and consumers - and especially across institutional boundaries - the meanings that are superimposed on the markup and the content change. As time passes, the "semantic drift" can also be witnessed within a single institution where the "markup of our forefathers" is reinterpreted by a newer generation. So it goes. -- Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon Inc. http://www.propylon.com http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com @propylonsean |