Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 14
Seeking Allies
There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is
assurance sufficient for the purpose of human life.
John Stuart Mill,
(On Liberty, 1859)
14.1
Exchanging Information
In this chapter I will describe in some detail a formal computer model of inferential
discourse based on the belief system (see Chaps. 6 and 7). The key issue is that a
logical model in a computer, based on rational sets, can usefully model a human
situation grounded on irrational sets (see Chap. 9). The background of this work is
explained elsewhere, as is the issue of rational and irrational sets (Billinge and Addis
2004
; Stepney et al.
2004
). The model is based on the Belief System (Addis and
Gooding
1999
—Chap. 7) and it provides a mechanism for choosing queries based
on a range of belief. We explain how it provides a way to update the belief based on
query results, thus modelling others' experience by inference. We also demonstrate
that for the same internal experience, different models can be built for different
actors.
The problem of what information is exchanged between people talking about
music arose when we started to investigate the possibility of providing a computer
aid to help music planners devise acceptable music programmes (see Chap. 13 and
Billinge
2000
; Billinge and Addis
2003
). In order to create such a computer aid
we needed to formalise the way people perceived music and communicated their
perceptions to each other. Studies of people attempting to pass this information on
seemed to fail completely and further, no correlates were discovered between the
words used and the music features (e.g. minor chords relating to sadness). This was
totally unexpected. It seemed that talking about music had no effective role and yet
people do talk and there is a complete industry devoted to communicating about
the subjective perception of music. Our observations did not make sense and this
required us to reconsider our methods.
The essence of the original approach was to take the simple surface observations of
communication, such as words, taken under controlled experimental conditions, and
then apply statistical and linguistic analyses based on simple denotational semantics.
Since these analyses failed to produce a result we then considered a deeper approach
