The process of Orthodoxy

The difficulty for any religious movement is that its internal justification for stability is the pointer back into the founding times, into in illo tempore, where the orthodoxy was completely revealed and implementable, while from the external viewpoint, the orthodoxy is the end result of the process.

The internal justification has a hard time with the fact that the external view often can point to internal events that tilt the trajectory one way or the other without any justification in the terms of the dogmatics.

For example, the resolution of the contention between the Judeo-Christians for whom the Gospel of Matthews is written and the Hellenistic Christians targeted by the works of Luke is not independent of the population sizes of these two groups, nor of the wars that the Jewish state fought against the Romans after the initial destruction of Jerusalem (which both Gospels assume). It is even possible that at the time of Matthews, the plane was already tipped against the Judeo-Christian groups, possibly by evicting the early Christian community that was Jewish from Jerusalem before its destruction in 70 ad (so the German Wikipedia on Judeo-Christians).

Clearly, Paul's writings presume a more Hellenistic and less Judeo-Christian setting and support that possibility, especially when considering the differences in the depiction of the Apostel Convention in Jerusalem (Gal 2 vs Acts 15).

Amusingly, one of the main time points in this process of the separation is the synod of Jamnia, that has itself the structure of a time point that is supposed to encapsulate a process---not only the termination of the canonical structure of the Hebrew Bible, but also the expulsion of the Judeo-Christians from the synagogue and the elevation of the Nazarim as a heretical sect into the Birkat HaMinim. As Günter Stermberg is quoted at the end of the German Wikipedia article on Jamnia, the retelling of the tradition made

aus vielfältigen, kontroversen und widerstrebenden Prozessen ein punktuelles Ereignis

out of a plurality of controverse and antagonistic processes a single-point outcome (own translation)

 QED

Rule Probabilities and Quantification

In Artificial Intelligence of the symbolic kind, it is often the case that probabilities are applicability constraints that are simply attached to the rules.

[In some survey of some part of the populace,] 80% of all Biritsh scientists are the children of scientists [the oldest child, an only child, etc].

The problem with these types of examples is that they disguise how the probabilities end up affecting the quantifier structure. This is especially true when we deal with a language that supports exceptions (i.e. non-monotonic changes) in the knowledge capture because there the extremes are best captured as exceptions.

None of the cities of of the Roman empire, excepting Rome itself, had more than five hundred thousand citizens.

(exceptWhen (equalSymbols ?CITY Rome)
    (=> (and (isa ?CITY City) (subOrganization ?CITY RomanEmpire)
             (population ?CITY ?POP))
        (lessThan ?POP 500000)))

(with appropriate temporal restrictions somewhere, e.g. implied by the Roman empire membership or on the  population number).

At the same time, at the middle range of the distribution, it would be most natural to speak of existential quantification, perhaps baths or amphitheaters, or a temple dedicated to a specific deified hero or an oriental fertility cult.

Thus we observe that a continuous model (probabilities [0,1]) meet a discrete model of quantifiers and exceptions, and we expect the continuous model to deal with data changes more gracefully, especially if the representation of discrete parts is not automatically driven by continuous representation. Perhaps we could consider 1% and 99% as the cutoffs for 'none' and 'all' (not in principle, in a specific case), and have rules to then conclude the discrete quantifier structure from the data distribution and its interpretation?

Improving Scripts

For some scripts, it would seem helpful to know not merely which scenes follow which scenes, but also what the temporal constraints are on the individual scenes to get them accomplished.

Consider Arthur C Danto's example of lighting a pipe; if the match burns at the standard rate, then there are just a few moments until the match is too hot to hold and needs to be dropped. Similarly, for a recipe, there are time constraints on how soon the next processing steps have to take place before the processed food has changed in temperature or composition or moisture contents to make the next step less successful (or even impossible).

At the same time, similar constraints hold in the other direction of moving "too early" as it were. The rates of these changes put temporal bounds on the script that would be good to know and good to have.

Ideal Types continued

While it seems perfectly normal to have Restaurant as an ideal type, it seems less convincing to have a restaurant visit as an ideal type; yet this is what the script was.

So we first note that there is a difference between ideal types and scripts in the sense that ideal types are much more structural. Ideal types are concerned about the fact that restaurants have kitchens and waiting areas and menus and specials of the day and a parking lot and fire exits. For the scripts, the emphasis is on the event types that can take place in that setting. The focus is less on how to build a restaurant and more on how to behave within one.

The second aspect is that ideal types are themselves structurally developmental. Sometime in the modern era, probably increasingly so after WW2, restaurants acquired cold storage rooms to house the meats and other perishables between acquisition and preparation. The ideal type can accommodate that shift readily; there are temporal constraints on the presence of the cold room until pretty much all restaurants have them (and use them to great effect, e.g. Ratatouille).

It is not clear that scripts as encodings of expected behavior accommodate as quickly. Perhaps temporally recent changes that affect the behavior more are required to show script changes; for example, the elimination of smoking rooms or requests to silence cell phones during dinner.

Perhaps there is then a general tendency as to classify the ideal type as part and parcel of structural history (Strukturgeschichte), the background on which the events take place (some of which may very well be guided by scripts).

Scripts, Golems and Ideal Types

In an attempt to bring together the viewpoints of the digital humanities on the one side and the knowledge representation community on the other, it is instructive to ask what the commonalities and differences are between scripts (Schank & Abelson, 1977), Golems and Ideal Types (Weber, 1912).

Scripts

Scripts are supposed to structure habitually reoccurring events. They have to do with how people internalize appropriate behaviors and how to negotiate situations. The classical case is eating at a restaurant. There are actors for capturing the participants; there are roles that these actors play in the various scenes that structure the event, and there are rules of continuity, consistency and temporal ordering that hold between the scenes and the events. Non-actors or matériel is present as well and has its own rules of continuity between the scenes. Not all scenes are required, and some scenes can be repeated multiple times. 

• At the restaurant, the patrons, as well as the serving staff, are actors.
• The other patrons belong to a backdrop unless people are sharing tables in a full cafe or similar.
• The menu and the tableware and the condiments form part of the matériel that is utilized in the individual scenes.
• On a bad day, the scene of an order being rejected due to lack of ingredients might repeat several times. That scene might be elaborate if the waiter has to check each time with the chef if there is any clam chowder, bass, salmon, lobster or shortcake left.
• The action relations are keyed to the scene of specific types which structure the roles; for example, the paying of the check is an economic transaction or a purchase, with the patron in the role of the buyer, the restaurant as represented by the waiter in the role of the seller. At the same time, it is a praising if the waiter receives a tip or a criticizing if the tip is small or withheld altogether. 
• Different matériel may require different sub-scenes structures; for cash, there is often change brought back; for credit card transaction, a receipt has to be signed to complete the transaction. If the payment is a gift card or a voucher, none of these might be necessary, unless the payment is partial. 

All in all, a pattern matching grammar for events that talks about expectations, down to the {n:m} notation of repetitions, and what one is going to find.

Golems

While the statements about scripts, roles, actors, matériel and similar cache out as rules with universal or existential quantification, the process of authoring these statements is sometimes not as intuitive as one would like.

Taking a leaf from prototype-based programming, Golems sketch a situation using generic terms that stand in for the involved types. If a script is more like a narrative or a "what I did last summer" essay, the Golem is more like an explanatory drawing in an encyclopedia.

(Image from the Public Domain Pictures Net)

Given such a setup, one can easily speak about the sternum being connected to the second (true) rib "through the intervention of the costal cartilage anterior." The naturalness of the authoring comes from bracketing the need to be specific about quantifiers, which are implied. Furthermore, there is a completeness to the golem that can be exploited to note that any connection not enumerated is therefore implicitly absent, akin to a completely enumerated collection type.

On the whole, while the script appears to be a more flexible form of representation, the Golem is a more concise form of representation that has a clearer affinity to natural language use.

Ideal Types

The notion of ideal types was introduced by Max Weber in his essay on the objectivity in the social sciences. Weber pointed out that expectations and recognition are guided in the social sciences by superimposing the features and substructures discovered on exemplars into a coherent role that subsumed all but over-described any of them. The canonical example has been the Medieval city, with its burghers and guilds and churches and fountains and market squares, defensive installations and city government, rights and duties and privileges and so on and so forth. And though no specific Medieval city ever covered all of these aspects, at least not at the same point in time, the ideal type guides discovery of information and serves as a backdrop to explanations and narrations.

In terms of knowledge representation, the ideal type is of course a very different beast altogether than either the script or the golem representation and some thoughts on how that difference cashes out is going to be the main concern 

Algerian Slavery

It is the highlight of the first part of the memoir of being a slave in Algiers when the just-liberated Dunkirk men and the five Turks go to the same tavern to celebrate their mutual freedom.

... as we came out of his Palace, the five Turks came to welcome us: They went along with us to our Inn, where we treated them, and we mutually related to each other our past adventures. Then was it that there pass'd among us three, the greatest satisfaction and enjoyments, that ever we had, or ever shall have in our lives. (p.69)

The history of Algiers and it's slavery with many remarkable particularities of Africk Aranda, Emanuel d', b. 1602., Davies, John, 1625-1693.