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.cb ABOUT OWING

	This note was inspired by a discussion with Terry Winograd
that started with the sentence %2"John owes Bill a horse"%1, said
to have been used as an example by Buridan.  The particular difficulty
raised by Buridan is that the sentence doesn't imply the existence
of any particular horse that John owes Bill or even any horse at all.
As I see it, John might equally well owe Bill a unicorn.

	The current issue concerns whether the proper definition
of owing should involve "points of view", a structure in KRL,
the %2knowledge representation language%1 being developed by
Terry and his colleagues at Xerox Palo Alto Research Laboratories.

	My contention is that owing has no objective definition
independent of human will.  We can create as fictitious persons
corporations or computer programs and admit them to the financial
world, allowing them to receive and pay money and acquire debits
and credits.  As society has constructed its financial system, it
is possible for a debt to be incurred and no person or even computer
program to ever know about it.  If I shoot an arrow into the air
and it kills your cat, but the cat crawls off to die, and neither
of us knows about it, I have incurred an obligation at the time
of my negligence.  Should the fact be discovered much later, my
estate will owe the value of the cat to yours with interest from
the time of the event.  If that is not the precise law, there is
nothing to prevent the legislature from making it the law.

	The point is that humans have created %2owing%1 as an
abstract entity, and we can perfectly well create others
or extend the ones we already have.
Let me try.

	The %2splenitude%1 of a man and a woman is a real number
between zero and one.  I shall not define it precisely, and after
it comes into use, different people will disagree somewhat on
the rules for determining it.  
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John McCarthy
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Computer Science Department
Stanford University
Stanford, California 94305

ARPANET: MCCARTHY@SU-AI
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