Previous post from Jack makes me re-visit old tracks about subject identity dynamically emerging and changing through conversation. In the last section in my Published Subject Indicators chapter in the Topic Maps Book, I wrote a few years ago:
The best PSI is the one that is most likely to change its content because it is maintained at the core of the community questioning the subject, and most subjects are moving targets.
Seems that Wikipedia pages are exactly that : places where living subjects are continually emerging through conversation. Googling conversation + identity, I stumbled on the title page written back in '96 by Paul Pangaro
The piece attempts to capture, in every-day language, the breadth of Conversation Theory as purveyed by Gordon Pask. Although it was not explicit in the publication, a sub-title could be, "Conversation Theory in Two Pages."
The opening line reads : "Without conversation, there is nothing (no thing)"
In earlier drafts of the Topic Maps Reference Model (TMRM), there was discussion about the nature of properties of topics. What is evolving in the TMRM is the notion that properties can be built in and they can be conferred through associations (actually, the term association has been changed to assertion. The nature of these changes allow for the fact that we sometime gain subject identity through dynamic property changes. I may have mentioned the notion of seeing as in an earlier post here. Consider the fact that, when you view someone driving in a car, you are seeing that person as the driver (or passenger) in the car, and not necessarily as a person identified by some name (or PSI :)
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