Re: Trying to define Surrogates

JOG wrote:
> erk wrote:
> > JOG wrote:
> > > are you telling me that two Cans of Campbell's have no identity without
> > > an artificial label? If that were true you would not be able to
> > > distinguish them, yet you can. What, then, is that distinguishing
> > > property?
> >
> > That's a deep philosophical issue for William Kent to answer
>
> And he does. It's obvious in hindsight, erk - one can of campbells will
> be in your left hand and one in yourright. You distinguish them by
> their unique positions in space. Now, thats hardly an attribute we can
> easily keep track of, so the artificial id acts as a surrogate for it.

So you're saying that the only available identifying attribute isn't an attribute at all (since we can't track it, we presumably don't care about it). I don't disagree, but then what is the artifical ID a surrogate for? The key has nothing to do with the location.

I'll have to do more reading on Kent - in one of his papers he discusses Globally Unique and Singular Identifiers (GUSIs), and theoretical functions that can translate a "reference" to something into its GUSI. However, that pushes a lot into the term "reference"... and the functions. It's an interesting discussion, but it's not leading me anywhere yet, except to believe that references to things involve a series of queries with more specific search criteria, and eventually to a result with 1 tuple that hopefully is what you were looking for. The mappings to and from a single reference or GUSI are full of holes, though I realize they're at the very boundaries of the identity problem.

• erk