[Person-ontology] D7 - Which languages are better than OWL?

[John F. Sowa]

Philippe,

The word 'however' is an adverb and 'but' is a conjunction;
both have similar implications.

 > Do you know a nominal form for "however"? (Relation names
 > should be nouns, not adverbs; this will be one of my assertions
 > in the future discussion about lexical conventions for categories).

Most versions of logic have a conjunction that corresponds to 'and'.
The usual translation of 'but' to classical FOL is the same as 'and'.

That translation misses an important feature of natural languages
that is lacking in classical FOL:  a distinction between the
obligatory (i.e., monotonic) implications and the default
(i.e. defeasible) implications.

Default logics distinguish classical assertions from default
assertions.  A default assertion is accepted if and only if it
is consistent with all the classical assertions.

A statement (p but q) means that p and q are both asserted, and
q negates one or more default implications of p.

If you need a noun, you can do what Cicero did when he was
translating Aristotle's Greek to Latin.  For his categories,
Aristotle put the definite article in front of the question
words to form "the how much" and "the what kind".  Since
Latin didn't have articles, Cicero added the suffix -itas
to form 'quantitas' and 'qualitas'.

So you could add -itas to the Latin word 'sed' for 'but'.
That would form 'seditas' or 'sedity' in English.

John